Pale Saints — In Ribbons (30th Anniversary)
Qobuz reissue review (Oct 2023)
Watching a band have its weirdest rough edges smoothed and buffed into a more accessible shape is typically a dismaying affair. And, on their 1990 debut album at least, Leeds-based band Pale Saints had plenty of weird and rough edges. Appropriately titled The Comforts of Madness, that debut record was — along with other 1989–91 releases by Lush, Pixies, and His Name Is Alive — a pretty clear line in the sand for the 4AD label that demarcated a shift from genre-agnostic albums imbued with ethereal melancholy into spiky and strange indie rock that was also ethereal and melancholy. Comforts was a noisy and unsettled album that fused sonic overload and dreamy textures onto delicate, sensitive songs; it was a profoundly unique and highly personal approach, so when Pale Saints released their second album in 1992, there was no reason to expect that it wouldn’t follow along the same path. But from the highly structured bombast that opens the album on “Throwing Back the Apple,” it’s clear that In Ribbons is documenting a band that’s taking a very different approach. Well-defined choruses and propulsive rhythms dominate the proceedings here, and the knock-on effects of the by-then well-defined “shoegaze” sound give In Ribbons a beefier and more cinematic soundscape. Some attributed this new, more muscular sound to the addition of a second guitarist (Meriel Barham, the original vocalist for Lush, had joined the band on a couple of post-Comforts EP and was now a full-time member) while others were sure that it was having Hugh Jones (Simple Minds, Icicle Works, Modern English) in the producer’s chair rather than the John Fryer/Gil Norton duo that produced Comforts. Another likely option is that In Ribbons isn’t all that different from Comforts of Madness. Primary songwriter and vocalist Ian Masters was still responsible for most of the material on In Ribbons, and much of it bears his highly unique imprimatur. From the epic “Hunted,” which is as gorgeous and sad as it is dense and dynamic, to the cracked singer-songwriter vibes of “Shell,” Masters’ gentle weirdness suffuses even the most direct numbers on the album. By the time the set closes out with the echo-drenched, Cocteaus-esque “A Thousand Stars Burst Open,” it’s clear that In Ribbons is an obvious — and exquisite — evolution of the band’s earliest sound, rather than a negation of it. (That negation would come on their next album, the Masters-less Slow Buildings.) This 30th anniversary edition features a clutch of early demos of album and EP material, including a demo of their cover of Mazzy Star’s cover of Slapp Happy’s “Blue Flower.” (This was the second such Dave Roback homage the band made, the first being their take on Opal’s “Fell From the Sun” on Comforts.) These demo versions have plenty of the wiry skittishness of early Pale Saints material, and serve as a nice complement to the sturdier, Hugh Jones-produced tracks on the album.
