Pale Blue Eyes - This House

 

My very good friend Jo, who I met and worked with in Katowice, Poland more than twenty years ago, goes to gigs for fun. Every time I see her on social media, she's either on her way to a gig or just coming home from one. It's exhausting frankly, and I'm not actually going to the gigs myself. Just noting the fact and imagining Jo at the gig screaming. Forgive me Jo, but we have known each other for a while now. It is what you do. 

Jo's latest gig related jaunt has been to see young Falmouth motorik concern Pale Blue Eyes at the Deaf Institute in Manchester on Saturday night.She posted about it. It seemed to go well.  I was glad of the reminder  and checked out their second album This House yesterday. PBE are hardly a new thing now, Their first records came out in 2021.

In the meantime they seemed to have shifted from a largely cult thing, (hey they're named after a Velvet Underground song , concerns don't get more cultish), to a decidedly Poppish and commercially promising one. This House bops breezily from the word go to the word stop. I can just see Jo bopping with her mates on the lip of the Deaf Institute stage on Saturday night

 This House  is first and foremost a lot of fun. Pale Blue Eyes, like Orchestral Manouveres in the Dark and Teleman before them, take all that serious stuff; The Velvets, Can, NEU! and Kraftwerk and transports it onto a bouncy castle in ludicrous fancy dress. Sails it into the charts.

This is all hughly skilful and wonderfully achieved. You can't stand around in dark nightclubs pretending you're Bowie and Eno and refusing to crack a grin all your lives. Well you can if you want to, but we've all got bills to pay and Pale Blue Eyes are going about paying their's in admirable, efficient fashion. It's all a lot closer to Planet Earth than Sister Ray.

I greatly enjoyed listening to This House yesrerday. I'm not sure I'll do so again. It's good but certainly not great. Robust market place fare but its destination is hardly the stars. I think instead I'd go for Scary Monsters, Here Come The Warm Jets, Kimono My House or even Architecture & Morality which probably more than any other record, launched the ship that Pale Blue Eyes currently find themselves on. I wish them plain sailing. Oh look. There's Jo at the railings, grinning and waving.

Here's Jo a while ago in South Korea. Second from the left. I'm afraid I can't really explain what's going on here. That's my friend Jo for you. She has a lust for life.