Search - Pastels, Tenniscoats :: Two Sunsets

Rising suns

Boxodreams | district of columbia | 01/27/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Good people and fans of delicate sounds, this pastels collaboration with tenniscoats is a breathtaking beauty, a shimmery summer thing released in winter, but a summer thing that lives in the twilight, the extended lazy, lovely hours of daylight's savings time, in a magic world where you are not rushing, stuck in traffic, to and fro from work, but, rather, wandering a park with friends, perhaps Japanese friends, enjoying an idyll by a lake or stream, or a backyard barbecue when all the hustle and bustle has died down and you're sitting in a circle with said friends, sipping wine under the fading day sky with music blowing hypnotic waves of soft goodness into your ears, simple joys. These songs are flower petals, pastels, sung in English and Japanese, with lovely keybs and guitars, sometimes shades of early Orange Juice strumming, the pastels' glaswegian bretheren. Much of it is hushed or sweet pop, with the tenniscoats, an experimental couple, providing seemless embellishments to the pastels gently hooky grooves. it is a masterwork of serenity in increasingly coarse times. The pastels come from out of the past, the '80's, and the Creation Label and can be considered parents of the twee but also with a fine sensibility, which included a long relationship with the gals from the unjustly forgotten but still very pertinent Shop Assistants. These grown-ups never wavered and lapsed into any kind of modern, bitter snark. They must drift through life very happy to make sounds this lovely. and that's just side one. pick hit: "Vivid Youth.""