Photo by Stefanie Schneider.

"Glitchy, melancholic." - Variety

"The secret glam rock star who was unheard and obscured – until now." - Dangerous Minds

Toxic lakes, wellness clinics and mud-caked bodies: the cardinal direction of Ensign Broderick’s BloodCrush is a saline fever dream, calibrated to the cultish wraith waste vibes of California’s Imperial Valley. Inspired by pilgrimage, anti-war protests, Decca-era Stones and Smetana, BloodCrush is the first new collection from the Toronto-based artist, who announced himself earlier in 2018 with four archival albums of wildly ambitious, hyper- referential art pop, a fraction of his forty years’ of recordings.

Cut to New York City, it’s 3am at The Carlyle. Our villain, an important man, is about to go down. Opening track “Standing In My Light” is a horn-spiked take on scandal and self, one part “Get Off Of My Cloud”-style id paired with a semi-fictionalized account of the day a former IMF director was arrested on sexual assault charges. This is a fitting first act for BloodCrush, a title that alludes to powerful but fallible emotions.

“Love Died/Dies Here” details a relationship pulled between two poles, a circulatory barter between giving life and using it up. This song, ostensibly about romantic accountability, is also a key to understanding this unique artist’s own journey, from the creation of an anonymous persona as a teenager in the 1970s and the ensuing decades of solitary music-making to taking the stage and releasing albums worldwide as Ensign Broderick in 2018. “This is how I expressed myself,” says Broderick of his decades of songwriting. “It became more and more private as the years went on. I think not in that type of really cloistered, savant way, like Henry Darger. I was a fully functional person in the world, I just had this other side of me that I kept to myself.” BloodCrush is this other side.

“Drowning Pool Eyes,” is a song crafted with calming, glowing orbs, meandering, wobbly steel, and soft intonations. “I could diagram the influences in this song,” says Broderick. “It’s the Burt Lancaster movie The Swimmer, but you distill it so much that you don’t see that anymore. There are references to The Beverly Hillbillies, the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá, Hank Williams, Smetana's opera The Bartered Bride, Muddy Waters’ ‘Mannish Boy.’ I hope people see these things.”

“Tear Stained Venus” is a fuzzed out road trip/bad trip from Bombay Beach, a place where golden asses are not some ancient metamorphoses but the inevitable outcome of a relentless sun. Or tanning bed. Bombay Beach, on the Salton Sea, is also the lowest point in America. Nowhere to go but up. “All sink and no swim,” sings Ensign Broderick over droning, buzzing guitar. This song is a reworking of the dark synthpop of “Anonymous

Incorporated” (BloodCrush), which is itself an alternate version of a delicate ballad “Wanderlust” (Ranger). With lyrical overlaps and three starkly different instrumental treatments, this triptych, as with others released over recent months, hints at an endlessly regenerative potentiality in Ensign Broderick’s catalogue.

As many of these songs were started in the early 1970s, around the time of the creation of the persona Ensign Broderick, the decades of editing, altering and recombining reveal an artist engaged in a constant interplay with his present and his past selves. The album is an unprecedented reflection on creative expression across a lifetime. Produced by Malcolm Burn (Emmylou Harris, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop), recorded in between three other new albums on the way, BloodCrush is as spontaneous an album as an artist who painstakingly analyses and cross-references every letter and note can make. This meticulousness is not a quirk, but a fully realized, highly attuned artistic mandate.

Ensign Broderick’s aesthetic - high concept, high art and high fashion - has brought his music into the orbits of many noteworthy collaborators, from auteur filmmaker Guy Maddin to internationally renowned visual artist Kris Knight, whose work graces the covers of all Ensign Broderick albums, and to Winnipeg’s New Music Festival, headlined by Philip Glass. Before launching this solo career, Ensign Broderick performed and recorded for decades in Toronto with a staggering number of artists, a list that includes Rush, Art Bergmann, Catherine Wheel and more.

BloodCrush will be out on Six Shooter Records on November 9, 2018.