Mike Simonetti has never sat still. Troubleman Unlimited, the label he founded in 1993, started from a foundation of noisy hardcore—bands like Rorschach, Unwound, and Rye Coalition—and expanded to include a staggering range of music, from danceable post-punk (Erase Errata, Tussle) to noise and power electronics (Hair Police, John Wiese) to new-school goth (Zola Jesus, Pocahaunted). When the rock world could no longer contain his ambitions, the obsessive record collector and one-time club promoter—at 17, he had flyered for New York’s Mars nightclub, where Vin Diesel worked the door and Bobby Konders spun house and dancehall—teamed up with the Chromatics and Glass Candy producer Johnny Jewel to create Italians Do It Better. The label became a platform for disco and synth-pop, as well as more esoteric beatmakers like Professor Genius and Invisible Conga People.
Pale Blue is Simonetti’s latest project. A new alias on a new label (2MR, or Two Mikes Records, a collaboration with Captured Tracks’ Mike Sniper), it is nominally a solo affair, though a singer named Elizabeth Wight, of the San Francisco duo Silver Hands, plays a key role, and Lower Dens’ Jana Hunter shows up on one of the key cuts. The title tells you something about its emotional register—wistful, elegiac, bittersweet— and the Field and M83 both offer clear antecedents for Pale Blue’s billowing synthesizers and yearning vocals. But for all the grandeur Simonetti wants to summon, Pale Blue’s sound is also modest, making the most of Wight's voice, layering and looping her to create an airy background wash that casts a rosy sunset glow over everything. Simonetti’s approach to structure, meanwhile, resembles a zoned-out road worker painting stripes on a lonely stretch of desert highway: Not a lot changes, but then, it’s not supposed to. The intensity rises and falls with the rolling hills, but the vistas remain the same, and the horizon never gets any closer.
Despite the uniformity, there are clear highlights. The title track is a big, bold, feel-good bummer of a tune that finds Wight testing the lower limits of her register, sounding a little like Siouxsie amidst a gleaming array of contrapuntal synths. "Dusk in Parts", the other obvious single, makes the most of Jana Hunter’s desolate wail, while the monotone bassline offers a sullen deadweight counterpoint to sentimental Rhodes melodies and chimes that glint like tear-stained cheeks. "The Math" could actually be mistaken for a Kompakt release—if the recent "Blurred Lines" verdict actually counted as legal precedent, Heiko Voss and DJ Koze might conceivably take Simonetti to court for so skillfully replicating the vibe of Voss’ Kompakt Pop classic "I Think About You (DJ Koze Mix)", and I say that in the most complimentary way possible. From the strings to the horn stabs to the buoyant background vocals, it’s a triumphant example of Simonetti at his extroverted best. The Bruce Springsteen cover "Tougher", on the other hand, represents the other end of the spectrum: it plays its cards close to the vest, with a trim arpeggio opening up only as much as necessary while Wight mutters come-ons. Her spoken-word vocals never quite synch with the beat, either, and as a result, it yanks us out of the production’s hypnotic swirl.
Some of the album’s more middling tracks—"Distance to the Waves", "Myself", "The Eye"—feel only halfway there. Simonetti has no issue letting a track that consists only of a single wavering chord and some ethereal background vocals drag on for seven-and-a-half minutes ("The Rain"). But if this 67-minute album is not without filler, even those airy expanses are perfectly pleasant. This unwillingness to edit himself was also an issue on Simonetti’s solo EP Capricorn Rising, in which one song appeared in three different versions, comprising nearly half of the record’s running time. This tendency is ironic, because it moves in the opposite of Simonetti’s approach as a label head. It speaks, perhaps, to the perfectionist’s desire to come up with the best possible version of a particular sketch—unable to pick a favorite, he simply presents all its iterations, at unabridged lengths. But maybe that has to do with a desire to wring the most out of a given idea—the most pleasure, the most yearning, the most eyes-closed, lost-in-a-dream intensity beneath a slowly twirling disco ball.
