ABOUT THIS ITEM

Mixed by veteran producer George Shilling, "Please And Thank You" is, according to singer and lyricist Steve Adams, an album loosely centered around the uncontroversial yet indeterminate idea of 'being nice to people'. From its stomping opener "Please Yourself", a sceptical look at hipsters (with 'cocaine in your moustache') offended by his cheap guitar with nods, lyrically and musically (and not accidentally) to Elvis Costello's classic masturbation anthem "Pump It Up", to its conclusion, a gentle ode to burying the hatchet, country-tinged "Old Wounds" (the only trace of their folksy origins), it covers a lot of ground. The gentle "Mimi" is about a beautiful girl who worked in an 'adult' shop, according to its writer, while the drably titled "St Albans", effectively a short story about a man who went to the wrong place to have sex with an Eastern European girl set to an ominous melody, started out as the more exotic "St Petersburg", a title that was deemed to be 'unrealistic'. "Borrowed Time", with its anachronistic plea to 'keep on choogling, even when we're tired', neatly captures the band's split personality while "Cinema Vs House", a witty dissection of the eternal dating seesaw, starts sweetly and ends up as a rock juggernaut. Eight years in, The Broken Family Band have gradually shed the accordionists, the cute girl singers, the banjo players, even the American drawl, and reduced themselves to the unchanged core of Adams, bassist Gavin Johnson, guitarist Jay Williams and drummer Micky Roman. And they've made their best album so far.