Click to play

The eeriest-sounding concert in Seattle this Halloween will be Broadcast at Neumo's.

The British band's take on electronic pop has always been a bit deathly—deadpan vocals, wheezy synthesizers—but new album "Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age" puts the group into the genre "hauntology."

Sounds quite Halloween-y, doesn't it? "I'll see you later at the hauntology show." It's not costumes or "The Monster Mash," but still. Hauntology.

The term was coined by deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida and has to do with the lingering semi-reality of memories and other various ghosts. For describing music, it's been most famously repurposed by critic Simon Reynolds to refer to the work of experimental British musician Julian House, who sometimes calls himself "The Focus Group." He collaborated with Broadcast on its new album, as the title suggests.

House is known for making collages out of music/sounds/noises from libraries that normally license their products for TV or film projects. He has an affinity for old stuff, particularly from the '60s, and favors a psychedelic approach, stretching and splicing samples, overlaying them like transparencies, isolating fragments and rearranging, repeating.

In one spot on the Broadcast album, flocks of birds make background static. In another, clay pots smash on the ground like punctuation. Somehow, the listener understands the bird sounds are old, imagines the chirps were perhaps lifted from a dusty reel-to-reel. The sound of the breaking pots is muffled, as if from a tape recorded from another tape. Throughout "Witch Cults," odd sounds come off like old effects used anew. And as the depressed telephone buttons, floorboard creaks and high-pitched whistles pile up—not to mention all the old music snippets, which seem to come from orchestral scores—a mood is established: "slightly creepy."

The pastiche goes excellently with Broadcast's musical style, which doesn't belong either to the present or the past and even at its most innovative never feels high-tech. On "Witch Cults," the band's pop smarts are downplayed in favor of more composer-y eccentricities. Vocals are crisply formal, sometimes churchlike. Basslines are brief and snappy. Where there are drums, they swing like late-'60s jazz-rock fusion.

The whole album is a fascinating listen, 23 tracks and 45 minutes of music that sounds as much like something constructed as many things deconstructed. There are songs, but they aren't what the album's about, and it moves along quickly enough so that once one gets into the rhythm of the thing, "songs" don't seem so important anymore. In a way, it's got the vintage, recombinant feel of instrumental hip-hop, although the producer whose work it most closely resembles, Los Angeles' Madlib, is unlikely to refer to himself as a hauntologist.

Live, Broadcast performs with a screen that shows images of various murk and distortion. Internet reviews from the tour and YouTube videos reveal real art, not screen saver ripoffs.

Atlanta act Atlas Sound, brainchild of one Bradford Cox, will co-open headline the show, and is also promoting a new, excellent album, "Logos." It douses slow guitar pop in all the reverb it can handle, amps it up, and pours it out in warm sheets. Check one "Logos" review here.