Have you ever found it odd that so many songs about feeling damaged or distraught are put together in a way that seems to convey the opposite. Major keys and crystal-clear production doesn’t exactly scream trouble. Artists, particularly singers, tend to find juxtaposing contrasting emotions to be a way of creating something unique, but when a singer has a tone in mind and can also find the perfect backdrop to amplify that feeling, we get something more powerful. Broken by Danelle is a song that builds incredibly well using slightly off-kilter elements to its advantage.
From the opening, the slightly transduced vocals have a quality about them that’s hard to pin down. They seem somewhat lo-fi in how they’re recorded, but they’re much more ambitious in their performance than what a lo-fi artist would be comfortable with. Between humanly off-beat claps and progressively more layered vocals, we get to enjoy a frightening and dynamic mix that evolves over time into something much grander than the original parts led on. In this way, the key to the song is sticking to the theme without sacrificing quality. Broken is a risky production altogether, but the payoff is well worth it.
-Paul Weyer