Tuesday, 11 September 2012

Review: PacificUV - Weekends


PacificUV - Weekends (Mazarine Records)
For their third LP, the trio of Clay Jordan (guitars, vocals), Suny Lyons (guitars, bass, keyboards, vocals) and Lemuel Hayes (drums, vibes), aka PacificUV, move from the sprawling ambient landscape of their debut (Rolling Stone called it a “masterpiece”) and 2008’s “Longplay 2” to an approach which keeps its dreamy, self-medicated synthetic symphonies well within the confounds of electro-pop.

A loose lyrical concept asks the question: what does one do on the weekends when a relationship has broken down? Underpinned by the dream triptych (“Friday… Saturday… and Sunday Night Dream”), it spans the album providing an aching intro, a deep and distant centrepiece and a stifling and climatic penultimate track.

Whilst they draw on a myriad of influences - the breathy narcotic stilted vocal delivery of “Just 4 Kix” and “Baby Blue”, and the ability to hold an anxious tempo tips winks to Messrs J Spaceman, Sonic Boom and Bobby Gillespie. “Funny Girl” has all the 80s electro-pop guts of OMD whilst the vocoder robotics of “Ballerina” and “Unplug Me” recall Kraftwerk and Air meets Electronic – yet the album retains a fresh and charming perspective. It achieves its aim, to make the perfect soundtrack for a chemically imbalanced weekend.
Willsk

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