Scottish indie band the Pastels' core members, Katrina Mitchell and Stephen McRobbie, are a graphic designer and a librarian, respectively. Do you consider yourself a regular person with no superhuman skill just trying to carve out a happy corner of the world? You could be a Pastel. Their albums-- from the scrappy noise-pop of 1987's Up For a Bit with the Pastels or 1989's Sittin Pretty, through the subtle, atmospheric sounds of 1997's Illumination-- are almost defiantly intimate. Topics of a Pastels song might include the importance of friendship and how nice it can be to walk around the city at night. In more than one interview, McRobbie has worried they would be remembered as the ultimate underachievers.
Slow Summits is their first proper album in 16 years. (Their last release was a 2009 split LP with Tenniscoats titled Two Sunsets.) Here people watch airplanes from the porches of their parents' house and stare at old drawings of older friends. They compare themselves to small piles of rocks behind neglected railroad tracks, lit by distant light. They kiss, hug, and wonder if anyone notices them, but rarely speak loud enough to be heard. "We are missed, but we exist," McRobbie sings near the end of the album, his voice low and bashful, less a singer and more someone drunkenly telling you how great they think you are.
Like Illumination, Slow Summits marries the rough naïveté of indie pop with soft, jazzy music influenced by 1960s artists like Burt Bacharach or the Free Design-- music whose pleasant immediacy is actually the product of sophisticated planning. Each wayward handclap and casual jangle of guitar is matched with tight, brushed drums and pro-grade violin. Credit goes to Chicago studio head and multi-instrumentalist John McEntire, who captures each sigh and flourish in vivid clarity. For a band that once seemed borderline unable to play their instruments, latter-day Pastels records feature an awful lot of impeccably recorded French horns.
"Rain is falling on a European street," Katrina Mitchell sings in the album's opening minute; "park your car outside and be discreet." Her voice is gentle and grainy, not a whisper but almost one-- a voice reserved for the house, or maybe the bed. Like former Olympia band Beat Happening or countrymates Belle and Sebastian, the Pastels are part of a strain of indie-pop whose sweetness is backlit by mystery and lust. In the role-reversing traditions of indie-pop, it's Mitchell who asserts herself while McRobbie sounds lost in daydreams. The album's most direct, upbeat songs-- "Check My Heart" and "Come to the Dance"-- are hers. When McRobbie's voice joins her on the last line of "Secret Music," it's like he's been hiding on the sidelines, too shy to come out. Ultimately, though, McRobbie finds his moment. Against the brisk, carefree backbeat of "Night Time Made Us", he confesses, "I wanted to steal something that was already mine." In case the idea wasn't clear, he repeats it, emphatically, before disappearing into a refrain of cascading flutes.
In a certain sense, the Pastels are a punk band, or a band that has always privileged punk values: community, equality, the homegrown and self-directed. But whatever politics the band holds are implicit. It's difficult to imagine the Pastels raging against any machine. It's easy, however, to imagine them turning away from the machine entirely. They've been doing it for 25 years. Like all Pastels albums, Slow Summits feels like the work of a tightly knit gang of outcasts. Together they roam familiar streets, checking out the public tennis courts and town center, armed with the knowledge that the deepest mysteries are the ones we barely notice and the greatest adventures are ones taken closest to home.
No wonder time has pegged them as underachievers. There's no glory in embracing what's already in your arms, no drama in uncovering what's already there. Instead there's tenderness, care, and humility, none of which have ever been particularly marketable. As Stuart Murdoch sang on Belle and Sebastian's "We Rule the School," "Call me a prophet if you want / It's no secret / You know the world was made for men and not us." So they went out in the middle of the night and made a new one.
