There's no denying the recent shoegaze revival that's been going on over the past few years. Frankly, I'm loyal to the older crop of bands and I think a lot of the new snoozegaze stuff doesn't quite cut it. As with most musical trends, this leads to people revisiting bands that were forgotten in the flood (anyone wanna come over and listen to Drop Nineteens Delware?). What I'm not really understanding is how The Pale Saints The Comforts of Madness has not been eaten up yet. This is one of my top three shoegaze records & undoubtedly a more solid, focused debut than that of the bigger bands that NME was blowing in the early 90's. I'm gonna go on blog as saying that no Ride album stacks up to this one as a whole. Don't get me wrong, I get off to Ride as much as the next fan-boy (not in the literally of course), but listen to this record; it's unrelenting. I had a cassette of this in this old Honda Civic that I had and I swear the cassette wouldn't leave the deck for a month at a time. It made every drive seem so much shorter. Had I not just looked, I would have told you this record was 20 minutes long and not 41; that's the mark of a truly great album. I did have an issue with the cassette having one side that was way longer than the other side (rivaling only The Feelies Crazy Rhythms cassette), but I found a way to enjoy that silence while I waited for the side to flip over. It usually involved the fast-forward button.
This record is beautifully produced in a way that everything is pretty thin, not Psychocandy thin, but in a way that really adds a tad of aggression to what was an otherwise pretty-sounding band. It really sounded great through my car speakers. The Pale Saints also really worked wonders with Ian Masters' falsetto-style singing by doing some great "California Dreamin'"-type things with layered backing vocals and a little echo/decay. Masters would eventually leave the band just after the recording of their follow-up. There's something about the follow-up, In Ribbons, that doesn't work as well as with the debut. They set the bar high here and I think there may have been a lot of tension while trying to follow it up. It's been known to happen, guys. Anyhow, Masters was replaced by a few people, I think, and the band went on to record one more record that I still have not been able to get into.
Comforts.
This record is beautifully produced in a way that everything is pretty thin, not Psychocandy thin, but in a way that really adds a tad of aggression to what was an otherwise pretty-sounding band. It really sounded great through my car speakers. The Pale Saints also really worked wonders with Ian Masters' falsetto-style singing by doing some great "California Dreamin'"-type things with layered backing vocals and a little echo/decay. Masters would eventually leave the band just after the recording of their follow-up. There's something about the follow-up, In Ribbons, that doesn't work as well as with the debut. They set the bar high here and I think there may have been a lot of tension while trying to follow it up. It's been known to happen, guys. Anyhow, Masters was replaced by a few people, I think, and the band went on to record one more record that I still have not been able to get into.
Comforts.
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