Pastels / Tenniscoats – Two Sunsets

I’ve spent over a year living in Japan and I can successfully confirm that their youths, in-between crafting frankly astonishing living sculptures where lesser men might have ‘hair’ and dodging the perilously high teen suicide rate, knock out awesome punk band after awesome punk band, It’s awesome. Thus when something altogether musically “other” arrives from those shores my interest in piqued. The album is a collaboration of Japanese experimenters the Tenniscoats and Scottish indie unknowns the Pastels and seems split down the middle with lulling Japanese crooning (a more melodic language than stereotypes would have one believe) and … lulling Scottish crooning. It’s album existing firmly in the realm of the waking daydream, a daydream soundtracked by hazed guitar playing and sunbathed harmonies.  

I suppose it’s hard to be scathing about something so inoffensive (one song is called ‘Modesty Piece’, it has pan-pipes, it didn’t rock in any functioning sense of the word) and often it does succeed in its coquette flirtations with the blissful ambience it so earnestly strives for (‘about you’, in particular, referencing Spiritualized’s most medicated moments, though obviously without Jason Pierce’s constant need to remind us that he has, once or twice, taken drugs). The pairing of Tenniscoats and the Pastels is sometimes beguiling though all too often weighed down by pleasantness.  

I found myself wishing for a change of pace, I’d cast my mind back to those frenetic performances in dank Nagaokan venues, specters and phantasms shrieked out melodies as the guitarists plied their trades, hard learned from 80s power anthems and the almost libelous misappropriation of AC-DC brand guitar idiocy – I’d talk to Japanese girls, they’d kindly overlook my homely appearance and allow me to buy them drink after drink… good times! Not here though, Two Sunsets is a world without that darker shadow, a world order gone topsy-turvy; a world where a band rocks less than coffee table heroes Zero 7. 

I suppose if the following adjectives: Dreamy, Soundscapes, Ambient, mood music smooth,  hypnotic, hushed appeal, then no doubt this album is right up your soporific alley, good music to ignore for the rest of us but then, why put it on at all? 

3/5

 

Daniel Burt

 

Here is the new video for the single Vivid Youth: