No Filler Music Podcast - It's not shoegazing, it's brogue-gazing: Pale Saints' In Ribbons

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

As we continue exploring the not-so-grungy, somewhat shoegazey side of 90s alt-rock, we're diving into Pale Saints' second studio album from 1992, "In Ribbons", a record that "bristles with quirk, strangeness and charm". Tracklist: Hunted Ordeal Hair Shoes Babymaker Featherframe Porpoise No Filler is a proud member of The Pantheon Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Boarding for flight 246 to Toronto is delayed 50 minutes. Ugh, what? Sounds like Ojo time. Play Ojo? Great idea. Feel the fun with all the latest slots in live casino games and with no wagering requirements. What you win is yours to keep groovy. Hey, I won! Feel the fun!

The meeting will begin when passenger Fisher is done celebrating. 19 plus Ontario only. Please play responsibly concerned by your gambling or that if someone close, you call 1-8665-3-3-2-60 or visit Comex Ontario.ca. With MX Platinum. You have access to over 1,400 airport lounges worldwide. So your experience before takeoff is a taste of what's to come. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply.

Unwrap holiday magic at Holt Renfrew with gifts that say I know you. From festive and cozy fashion to lux beauty and fragrance sets, our special selection has something for every style and price point. Visit our Holtz holiday shop and store or online at Holtrenfrew.com. And welcome to no filler. The music podcast dedicated to sharing the often overlooked hidden gyms that fill the space between the singles on our favorite records. My name is Quentin with me as always as my brother Travis. And today we are diving into Pale Saints and their album from 1992 in Ribbons.

So we're kind of hanging out in between college radio, alt rock, and shoegaze. Last week we covered Catherine Weill and their album Chrome. And, dude, I'm like obsessed now with finding more acts like this from that era. Yeah, this has been my favorite, probably my favorite thing about doing this podcast is having an excuse to stumble upon these bands like this that we kind of missed because they weren't, you know, on the radio, necessarily. They weren't on MTV in the 90s when we were just kind of basically just listening to whatever was in our brother's record collection, right? So he didn't have bands like, like hum, or like this band, or like Catherine Reel or any Shugay's band at all, right?

So there's so much good 90s rock out there, and there's so many different, like, branches of, if you stem from just like alt rock, and then it's like Shugay's Grunge, you know, it all kind of stems from there, and then there's these branches that go off from there, you know, and there's just so many acts out there. Now, I have a feeling that if we grew up in the UK, we probably would have heard of Pale Sains, and a lot of these acts. Pale Stains' first album, The Comforts of Madness, which came out two years before in Ribbons, the one we're going to cover today, reached the top 40 on the UK albums chart.

So, you know, like they were making waves over in the UK. But, yeah, like you were saying, and maybe it was just because we weren't paying attention. mentioned, but yeah, I don't think these groups really made, you know, a lot of noise here in America, and I don't think MTV was covering them either. And, you know, they were a major part of the emergence of shoegaze. They had their album, as I mentioned before, Comforts of Madness, on Pitchfork's 50 Best Shugays albums of all time. It's at number 21 on there. Our intro song was a song called Hunted, which is on this album in Ribbons that were covering. And, you know, just from that minute long intro, I think what stands out to me is, and this is kind of like what

Catherine Wheel was doing with their early stuff, it did feel a little grungy, right? Like the chords, the guitar tone. But then you've got his like really, Ian Masters, he's the lead singer. I like this quote here. He's got this ethereal choir boy-like vocals. Ethereal certainly lends itself to Shugaze. So, yeah, definitely. And that's what stands out to me is his voice and how it contrasts with this, like, dark and moody kind of, you know, atmospheric dream pop.

All right. So before we get into it, let's take a brief moment, Trave, talk about our sponsors BetterHelp. So, Travis, as you know, I've actually used BetterHelp before when I first started back at school. And I really loved it, dude. I really loved my therapist. He's a great guy. the tools that he gave me, you know, to kind of help with anxiety and stress, I still use to this day. It's time to stop being ashamed of normal human struggles and start feeling better because you deserve to be happy. And now you don't have to worry about finding an in-person therapist near you to help. BetterHelp is customized online therapy that offers video, phone, and even live chat sessions with your therapist. So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to.

It's much more affordable than in-person therapy, and you can start communicating with your therapist in under 48 hours. And we've got a special offer for no-filler listeners. Right now, you can get 10% off your first month of professional therapy at betterhelp.com slash no-filler. Again, that's better-h-el-p.com slash no-filler to get that 10% off your first month. Thanks again to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode. All right, Trave, let's get into it. So there's this great, tiny little, it looks like just a review from like a music section of an old newspaper, short and sweet little review of In Ribbons.

By a guy named Stuart McConey, he says here, Pale Saints, Leeds Strangest, are certainly part of no herd. Though there are superficial similarities with other breeds of wan, pale, and interesting guitar groups, Pale Saints are one-offs, genetic aberrations, where the bulk of their peers are recycling the same few half-formed notions. Graham, Ian, Mariel, and Chris are positively drunk on ideas. In Ribbons is a rock record for some of the time, but it wants to be a whole lot more. It's ambitious, perverse, oblivious to fashion, and desperately self-centered. It's marvelous. That's a great way to tee it up, dude. What was it drunk with?

Ideas. Ideas. Okay. So that tells me that like this is going to be some experimental stuff. What stands out to me about this record is just how varied it is from track to track. And that's what I love about it. And one thing before we get into it, I want to mention. So Mariel Barham is, she's the second guitarist in the group.

I don't know if she's considered rhythm or lead or if they bounce back and forth on that. but she was the lead singer for Lush. She was the original vocalist for Lush. So that, again, I mean, that's another huge shoegaze act. And she joined the group in 1990. And Ian Masters, who is the lead singer, so Mariel will sing on some of the tracks as lead, but Ian Masters is the lead singer.

He actually leaves the group after this record. He was kind of already just fed up with the routine of, you know, constantly riding and touring and all that. So this is the last record that features Ian Masters in his choir boy-like vocals. So let's dive into it. Here is our first pick on N-Ribbons. This is track two on the record. We got two clips to play.

This song is called Ordeal. Yeah, so in the same vein as Catherine Wheel, I feel like there's, you know, just a, how do I say that? There's like hangover from the 80s still in the sound, you know. And really, maybe it really does come down to, you know, these guys are English lads, right? But I hear a little bit of, God, what does that band? The Stone Roses, which was another like, kind of like alt, rock, a little bit of new wave kind of sound to them. It's guitar heavy is what I love about it.

And very instrumental, you know, for the most part. And a lot of these tracks on here is, I mean, look at the lyrics. It's two lines. That's it. Yeah. Right. And I've got another clip. The rest of it's all just instrumental.

And, you know, it's got this like, you know, kind of like with Catherine Real, space rock, I think, fits here, you know, sonically how it sounds. So again, going back to that quote from earlier, you've got his ethereal vocals alongside these dark atmospheric noise pop tunes. And that's, yeah, that's a mainstay of this record is just very atmospheric in a really great way. And another thing that I think is interesting, and this might play into the overall sound that they've got gone, and it does kind of lend itself to that shoegaze kind of sound.

So I'm pulling this from an interview. So this is kind of interesting. This is an interview between Ian Masters. and Steve Corralt, which is one of the members of Ride. So Steve is interviewing Ian. And he says here, I found, so this is Steve talking to Ian. He said, I found your playing style unique. And I try to emulate it on a few ride tracks.

What inspired you to play that way using chords instead of the more traditional approach? So remember, Ian is a bass player. So Ian says, I have no idea. I had never played bass before in my life. So my approach was that of a natural swimmer. The band needed a bass player to survive, so I went and bought one and played it like I had played the guitar. Like I said, my approach is that of a natural swimmer. Like, you know, I'm not going to be doing some, like, professionally taught, like, backstroke.

I'm going to just do my own thing, and hopefully I swam. He only started playing the bass because the band needed a bass player. So, you know, he's strumming chords like a guitar player does. Yeah, I'm always fascinated when I hear about it. that kind of stuff where it's like yeah you know somebody needed to play the bass so i just i picked it up you know what i mean yeah it seems like a lot of times it's like this person is a really incredible bass player you know and like there wasn't like a passion lifelong passion you know and desire like dedicated to learning and mastering the base it's just out of necessity they pick it up it's kind of like

kim gordon you know i always wonder like it maybe it's because you weren't quote unquote classically trained that you maybe do things that that are a little bit of unorthodox time and time again that's that ends up being the case yeah you don't have any like preconceived notions necessarily of like here's how you play the bass you know right exactly your first time playing the bass might be to make music for for this like sound that you and your bandmates are trying to craft so it's really interesting all right here is clip two from ordeal feel like that drum sound is an 80s drum sound the kind of like the reverb and stuff on that snare just makes me think of the 80s.

Yeah. That the new wave sound. Right. I just wanted to sneak in that little xylophone or whatever that is. Yeah, that is cool. A little number that they add in. But that's, to me, what I like about early 90s rock is it like, there's still like one foot in the 80s, you know?

Yeah. Like you heard that and some of like the gish stuff, the smashing pumpkins. Yeah, totally. It always seems like when you're thinking about rock specifically, like we just put these walls around a sound, you know, it's like, oh, there's the 80s sound. And then right when the 90s happened, you know, it was all about grunge. It's like, well, no, I'm not, it's, you know, it's a transition, you know, it's like it's like 1990 hits and suddenly, you know, it all just changes. Like, it's a gradual, like evolution, right? Yeah. And you really have to be

a music fan actively seeking out music in the early 90s to realize that. Otherwise, you're just going to get bombarded with with grunge and you miss out on this stuff all right jumping down quite a ways here we're going to play track eight this song is called hair shoes chilling dude yeah i was gonna say the word we use a lot is it's a haunting but i like the um the i think he the guitar player might have like a a slide on their finger like one of those like glass slide in like that yeah something which is kind of cool and that might be the um the um the i think the guitar player might be the uh the drunk with creativity or whatever. Drunk with ideas.

Yeah, and that's, you know, that this is that dark, you know, atmosphere kind of sound. Yeah, I love the lyrics too. It's very emo. He says, how long can I contain this wretched that no cure can tame? Feel it coursing through me still. Never knew that I could feel so ill.

So I'm going to read this quote again from Stuart McConey. He says, They aren't afraid to be alluring, but neither are they averse to freezing your blood on occasion. Hairshoes is the sound of great moaning winds passing across the frozen wastelands of the soul. Woolly mammoths are roaming about here. It is positively prehistoric and ace. Love it.

Positively prehistoric. Yeah. And I got another clip actually from this one. I just want to kind of play a little bit more to show you how it just kind of devolves into just straight up noise. So here we go. Here's clip two from hair shoes. You know, it almost has like an Italian godfather. Oh, yeah.

That little... There's an instrument, dude, that, you know, I wish we knew. And there's not much on personnel info that I could find as far as who's doing what. But for the most part, it's just the members of the group doing most of the instruments. But yeah, they do have a few more arrangements in there. Just cello in one of the songs. But you know what this reminds me of, man? Cave in.

Again, specifically antenna, this sound reminds me of like the kind of sound on tracks like Sea Frost or Breath of Water, you know? Breath of Water, yeah. Yeah, I can see that. And like, you know, Breath of Water, we talked about how Catherine Wheel had some of that like sonic quality to it. Yeah, it's that space rock. That's where the space and like the Prague rock kind of stuff.

And it's all that reverb really. It's the reverb and stuff like that that's kind of doing that. that's kind of making it sound ethereal and, like, sort of, like, swirling around you, you know. Yeah, yeah. If you don't know what we're talking about, we actually did a full episode on Cave-In, their album, Montana, which is our favorite album of Cave-In. They're a heavy metal group that briefly took a turn to please RCA, the record label, and release this more, like, atmospheric space rock album.

So check that out. And we've got two more tracks to play, Traff. I got somewhere to be here pretty soon, so let's just chug right along. This next one might be my favorite on the record. This is track eight. It's called Baby Maker. Great song, man. I love it.

Yeah, really good song. So, like, this makes me, you know, I'm reminded of a lot of 2000s era indie bands and maybe even like the emo sound of the early 2000s a little bit. Yeah, right. The third wave emo? Yeah, I think so. So like... Like Jimmy World era?

And I was even thinking like, what's his name? Ben Gibbard? Ben Gibbard, sure. Is that, that's the, Death Cab for Q? Yeah, Death Cap, yeah. The Death Cap guy. Like, maybe even if we were to try to think of a Shoegays band, maybe like the Drop 19 lead singer had that more like soft quality.

So that's the thing. Here's where this band is way different than Catherine Wheel. I feel like Catherine Wheel was always a little bit, had a little bit more edge to them. Yeah. And we're writing more straightforward, quote unquote, rock songs, which we talked about last week. But these guys are starting to, you know,

this is more of an alt-rock sound with the clean guitar sound. There's not even a whiff of grunge in this sound at all, right? So, like this is more, almost like this song, at least, had kind of a surf rock sound to it a little bit. But the clean guitar was, you know, more in line with the kind of stuff that made REM

get the college rock label and the alt-rock label on them. they were having that like 60s jangly guitar sound. Yep, totally. That's what this song had for sure. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm going to read just straight from Wikipedia here, three little quotes that really sum it up, man. It says Jack Rabbit of Trouser Press called In Ribbons alluring and attractive,

rich in complexity and raw emotion. Martin C. Strong wrote that the subtlety of its shredding chords and sporadic sonic dreamscapes were let loose all over the shop. I love that. And Music Hound Rock, the Essential Album Guide, wrote that the album immaculately balances widescreen guitars and soft melodies. Wide screen guitars, that's perfect. Like, we were trying to, you know, find words to describe space rock.

Wide screen guitar. Yeah, widescreen guitars. I'm just trying to, I'm taking that all in right there, that metaphor. That's good. It went from the one, one to one ratio to freaking 16.9. Dude, you know what I can't stand? I can't stand the people that have, you know, flat screen, modern televisions, and then they turn on the full screen mode or whatever.

It's like, dude, I could see more. You cut off half his head, bro. You can't. Yeah, you can't see more. Yeah. But that's kind of what I like about that metaphor to describe. guitar because it's like you're opening it up a little bit you're you're hearing more things maybe or like getting the full range of that guitar sound yeah well this is why we don't write we just read aloud

but other people wrote yeah all right man i got one more to play so i wanted to uh play a song with mariel it's the lead singer because she's got a great voice this is another great one i got two clips for this as well. This is track 11. This song is called Feather Frame. Yeah, I think they pulled off that slight delay on the drums and that snare drum would hit and then the rest of it kind of

dissipated. Cut away and it kind of echoed a little bit. I thought that was really well done. It really cool. Same with her vocals too. They had a echoey effect on her vocals too. Love love her voice, dude. Yeah. Her voice kind of sounded more like a traditional shoegaze voice, I guess. Definitely on

the dream pop side of things dream pop yeah so i actually wanted to play two clips this is basically the whole song um but i really like this little like interlude kind of little ditty at the end that i think's really cool so here is the second half of feather frame yeah very like playful you know kind of like a like a music box or something i mean they're drunk with ideas too like one of those jewelry box that you like you crank it and then the ballerina spins you know a little ballerina but that's yeah totally the very last, like, part of that song before that outro, kind of had some grunge chords. It didn't sound like grunge, but like I can, I could, I was actually thinking to myself, man, I like to hear a version of this with the distortion cranked up a little bit because,

like, I could hear, you know, that it had sort of like a grunge skeleton to it. But, yeah, that's a really effective outro there. And I think that's, you know, again, the creativity that was being referred to with the drunk with creativity, you know, because, you know, I love, I love experimentation like that, you know. Yeah, totally. Well, that's all I got, brother, short and sweet on this one. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Next week, we're going to take a brief detour for what you heard episode.

And then after that, we're going to come back and cover Hum, right, Tribe? Yeah, we're going to talk about downward to seven word. I am so stoked about that. I'm excited, too, to get more into it. Such a great record. Yeah. There's something special about, about, about, those guys, man. Hum

is easily one of my favorite acts from the 90s. And, you know, they put out that new record in 2020 that kind of got them some attention again. I brought one of their songs to our year-end recap for 2020.

Yeah, big fan of it. Yeah. It was awesome to hear new stuff from them. And it sounded like they kind of picked up exactly where they left off. So anyway, yeah, we'll talk about Hum and that'll give us an opportunity to talk about what the hell space rock is a little bit more because that's one of the labels that gets thrown on them. As you'll see by some of the, as you'll hear by some of the lyrics, I should say.

And I want to stick in this in this pocket, dude. I think I might want to dive into either ride or lush. This is our pocket, dude. Just keep this train going. My hands are always in. Always. Oh, dude. Damn it. And I wanted to mention this. Let me real quick, if I can find it, because I just exited out of it. Okay. I wanted to read this because I thought it was interesting. from Stuart McConey. I was quoting him earlier, but he said something. I like you have an actual scan of a newspaper clip.

Yeah. Yeah. So now listen to this, bro. See if you know what this means. So he says, all right, talking more about the album. And he's talking about a song called Shell that I didn't play, but he says,

Shell is a brazenly lovely ornamental string ballad in the midst of raging noise. Shamefacedly beautiful. It's more. more brogue gazing than shoe gazing. Brogazing. What does that mean? So not like bro, like a frat dude.

Definitely not bro. Brog gazing. I don't know what brog means. It's a style of low-heeled shoe. Okay. You know, sometimes you just make shit up if you're a writer. Oh, hang on. I get it now.

I get it. Oh, I get it too, dude. It's a more fancier. Got it. form of shoe gaze. Okay. So a brogue is like... It's a very fancy, like, formal wear kind of shoe.

Okay. Now we got it. See? God, man. Yeah. Okay. Well, that makes sense. Very clever.

Yeah, very clever. Stuart McConey. You're all right, man. So it's shoe gaze for more like highbrow people. It's more highbrow shoegaze. Yeah. Anyways, that's that, brother. You want to wrap us up?

And then I've got an outro for us. All right. So you can, of course, find us on Instagram, which is, you know, a really good place to get in touch with us. That's really all it's for now, dude. You know what? Yeah, I've just got too much going on in my life right now to even think about social media. Me too. Me too.

Hey, you know what? If you're out there and you want to run our Instagram account, let us know. And tell us on Instagram. Yeah, let us know. We'll give you the keys to that. Anyway, just search for No Feeler podcast. You'll find us on Instagram. And you can also, of course, listen to us on. the Pantheon podcast network. So if you were to follow them on any app that you can listen to podcast from, you'll get our newest episode in their feed. And you'll also get all the other great podcasts under the network, which is all music-related podcasts. So that's pantheonpodcast.com.

And yeah, we'd like to thank AKG, as always, for sponsoring the show and the network. Join us next week for what you heard. an outro lined up for us, Traff. So this is the song of Pale Saints that I recently heard that got me turned on to dive into more of their stuff. So they have a little EP from 91 that came out between the comforts of madness and in ribbons. There's a six-minute instrumental song called Porpoise that I latched onto. It's really great.

That's going to be our outro. And yeah, until next week, thank you as always for listening. My name's Quentin. my name is Travis. Y'all take care.