Every Valley

Informative and moving, Every Valley doesn’t exist in the traditional space of an album--it’s almost music as journalism, or a musical collage version of This American Life. If nothing else, you won’t hear anything like it this year.

Poignant and powerful. [Aug 2017, p.110]

The music beautifully captures a sense of awesome industrial power and a crushing sense of loss.

Every Valley is timely and useful. [Aug 2017, p.89]

Every Valley feels far more substantial [than 2015's The Race For Space], as PSB's amorphous brand of prog, motorik and post rock integrates fully with BFI clips and first hand interviews. ... Pathos and fortitude are plentiful. [Aug 2017, p.35]

The cumulative impact on Mother Of The Village and Take Me Home (featuring the Beaufort Male Choir) is potent: packing robust poignancy, these lullabies for working-class pride deep-mine history with great storytelling skill, sensitivity--and, pointedly, a kick of sustained political relevance.

Every Valley is lush and symphonic, more interested in expressing the human spirit of the mining communities than aestheticising the conditions in which they toiled.

Public Service Broadcasting put that political and economic disconnect into sharp relief, placing human lives and industrial mining on a broad spectrum that let both sides be heard.

In spite of the somewhat dour tone of this album, there’s plenty of musical depth and light to be found throughout.

Even more so than on The Race for Space, PSB seem less like a gimmicky novelty group and more like a new breed of intelligent, socially conscious pop music.

Public Service Broadcasting's intentions are to be praised, even if the result is weak and unfocused. If the SDP leadership had formed a band, it would sound like this.

It’s not light-hearted or easy to stomach, but for placing themselves into the shoes of others and broadcasting from the inside, there’s no real match for Public Service Broadcasting.

Every Valley doesn’t add much that is new. Still, the album’s standout, the rousing title track, employs Richard Burton’s voice to fine effect.

Rather than the optimistic, outward-looking The Race For Space, on Every Valley he tells the grim story of the decline of Welsh coal-mining, from the title-track’s proud proclamations, declaimed in Richard Burton’s Rushmore rock-face of a voice, through to the poignant conclusion of “Take Me Home”, a Welsh Male Voice Choir’s plea to “let me live again”.