By Berlinda Recacho
Joining the ranks of groups named after another band's song (in their case, The Velvet Underground's wistful ballad) the English trio Pale Blue Eyes evoke the sound of Nineties post-Britpop bands, channeling the punchy assertiveness of Eighties college radio and the smooth allure of shoegaze. Husband and wife Matt and Lucy Board marry guitar and keyboard with Aubrey Simpson's bass to create rippling indie riffs, sequences, and rhythms. Lucy surfs over synthesized patterns, adding a layer of cool complexity, while Simpson's bass-lines provide structure, charging through Matt's jangl guitar as his voice (in the tenor of Death Cab for Cutie's frontman Ben Gibbard) plays like an instrument rippling just above the level of the music which calls to mind Ride and Slowdive.
Pale Blue Eyes build This House in a specific order. "More" sets expectations with crunchy repetition, the insistent paranoid self-centeredness of the Eighties. "Simmering" is appropriately jangly, with synth-runs that draw you in and bass-lines that keep you dancing even as it cryptically directs you to "Take a picture before and after/Before and after." "Hang Out" is a sort of space-lounge Stereolab-esque sequence with frenetic Ramones undertones: "Now and again/You stop yourself/You seem to come alive/No turning back." The band describes structure with its opposite in "Spaces": "Let it go -- you're already gone -- these feelings, they're temporary." "Heating's On" radiates a plaintive lament: "No signs of in wrecking raptures/Can't you see that no god will come?/Don't hurt, you can wait forever/All this it's hover, hovering over my heart/Does it feel like, does it feel like home?" and pierces through the walls and ceilings with the bright brass of trumpet. The spectral "Our History" runs hot and cold, pushing away and simultaneously beckoning. My favorite track on the album, "Million Times Over" is a showstopper of a tune, a thrilling mix of expansion and contraction a la My Bloody Valentine, soaring out with longing and then retreating into insecurities:
"Do you ask yourself is this the best that we can hope for?
Oh, time saved the world in me
Your words ring around me, soft my hands in me
And all tastes so sweet, I need to show them my teeth
Another day, was another day
And I'm always changing the style"
"Illuminated" provides a light to see by, then switches it off to wander through shadows: "We don't have the answer/Part of all the spoiler/Everything comes and goes/You know what you know." "Sister", the darkest song on the album, reverberates like a promise, or a threat: "This is the place I want to be/But don't you stop, my need can't fade/We should make it be/Now that we have peace/It's not you, it's not me/Found a way out, found a way out." "Takes Me Over" shoots through the final corridor: "Fly over wrecked nights/Without surfing/Dreaming again" to the haunting, undulating vestibule of "Underwater": "If you feel I am too hard to understand/I just want you to know that/Sing it out loud/Out loud."
Because of the time difference between action and our brains processing that action, we live perpetually in the past, even if it's by only 80 milliseconds. There might not be such a thing as being truly present because "now" doesn't really exist. It's a useful analogy for music that references the past: by recreating a sound that is removed (often by decades) from its source, this music from the future merges with its own history. Pale Blue Eyes construct songs today using blueprints from yesterday and convincingly create a now that doesn't exist in the real world, a time and place particular to each listener.
This House by Pale Blue Eyes is out now via Full Time Hobby.
[Photo: Pale Blue Eyes Bandcamp]