I often get a bit annoyed when people talk about “80’s music” (as if a decade can be a genre) and then cite the likes of “Rick Astley” and “T’Pau” as an example of what they mean. As someone who lived through that unfairly maligned decade, whose formative experiences way back then left me with a love of bands such as The Waterboys and Cocteau Twins, The Smiths and Aztec Camera, I can help put the record straight.
The eighties were a time of significant change; the post-punk mixing pot gave us all manner of new adventures, new technology, and new potential. “Paradise Cove” is the first taste of Bleach Dreamer’s debut ep, If You Even Care, and if ever you wondered what the eighties sounded like, not an insignificant amount of it sounded a lot like this!
Like bands such as The Blue Nile and Orange Juice before them, “Paradise Cove” balances that sound of the new pop ethic, one based on the sonic world that synths were starting to offer the music maker, but a pop that also oozes sophistication. It was the blueprint that the New Romantics, as they would soon be known, would later commercialize and cash in on, but before that happened, a wealth of cool music came from labels such as Sarah and Postcard Records, and, of course, the luminous 4AD. This would have fit right into such an independent taste maker’s catalogue.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that Bleach Dreamer are merely a pastiche of what has gone before, nothing could be further from the truth, but there is plenty of that same blend of elegance and dreamstate, sonic seduction and groove that marked such pop bands, pop that reached for sonic heights rather than accepting the lowest common denomenators that seems, sadly, to have become that genres norm today.
“Paradise Cove” is subtly nostalgic but, in the way that music is cyclical, perfect for the here and now, a blend of the best of what has gone before and a taste of what might be again. But more than anything, it is a reminder that pop music, even the most accessible and gently infectious, can still meet some impressive sonic standards, if it wants to.
