Euphuistick,
Operatick,
Flamboyantick,
Aureatick,
Rhapsodick,
Ensign Broderick.

Enter Ensign Broderick’s dizzyingly expansive musical cosmos, where you can ping-pong across decades at lightning speed from Toronto’s Le Coq D’Or to the Metropolitan Opera, from The Blitz to the Louvre. A disciple of the ‘triumph of artifice’ of new wave, he is also a furtive, meticulous cataloguer of self and scene. Ensign Broderick has emerged out of nowhere with a fully formed artistic vision: a dramatic, piano-driven sound that is lavishly out of time.

With Feast of Panthers, the first album set for release by Six Shooter Records, Ensign Broderick opens his vault, a tangled fuse box that holds forty years of songwriting circuitry. With songs that hail from 1975-2011, this album reveals a creative process like no other, one that mines the glam and bathos of new romanticism, Toronto’s little known 60s R&B heyday, classically-informed structures and conventions and deeply personal stories of codified tyranny, in no particular order. Feast of Panthers is less a debut album than it is a door, one of many, into the labyrinth.

“True Shame” – the first single coming on January 5, 2018 – is a brassy, swaggy, sashaying offering that features an easy-to-spot Jeff Beck reference and an open invitation for use on a catwalk. The song reminds us that Ensign Broderick isn’t writing music that merely hails a certain era, it’s music that originated in situ.

“Yogi Jones,” another standout, is a song about a childhood friend with a dark family past. The song’s coda, inspired by Romantic composers such as Schumann and Mendelssohn, is an example of a recurring theme in Ensign Broderick’s work, the overlap and intersection of classical and pop music.

The song “Accidence PSA” exists in multiple versions and exemplifies Ensign Broderick’s deconstructive approach to his music, where he remakes and rebuilds songs to create a complicated soundscape. The artist’s participation in Winnipeg’s New Music Festival in January, where he will perform with keyboarding Jónas Sen (Bjork), is a fitting avant-garde framework for understanding this unique creative process, where songs exist in a perpetual state of reinvention and flux.

Never a man of half-measures, Ensign Broderick commissioned Canadian superstar artist Kris Knight to paint five companion pieces for songs on Feast of Panthers. Themes of masculinity and romanticism are intimate points of connections between the artists. For example, one of the central messages of “Accidence PSA,” that we are capable of visiting misfortune unto ourselves, is further articulated in Knight's paired painting. “It looks beautiful from a distance,” Ensign Broderick describes, “it reminds me of sanctuary and escape. But then you look at the objects inside and you see that it’s a dangerous place to be.”

Talk to Ensign Broderick for a few minutes and words like “frisson” and “liebestod” are part of casual conversation. Talk to Ensign Broderick for a few minutes more and you probably won’t be able to stop staring at what he’s wearing. “It’s my interpretation of an Ensign Broderick Nudie suit,” he says of a particularly ornate outfit worn for a recent photo shoot. “I’ve spent 50 years refining my superficiality. It’s all plastic. It’s all disposable. But I know it isn’t. But I know it is.” Ensign Broderick wears his sound on his sleeve.

Six Shooter Records is excited to introduce Ensign Broderick with Feast of Panthers, coming March 9, 2018.