The Soft Pink Truth – Was It Ever Real?

Thrill Jockey
This is the disco of slurs, of slurry, of slurrrs. Everything seems wasted, in the sense of my favourite Donna Summer track (yep, “Wasted”).

Even the hi-hats sound shattered, like you’ve found yourself at Shoom sometime around 1987, the real turn of the century; still dancing but full of MDMA on the down, starting to feel your calves give out but not wanting the music to ever stop. That girl in that YouTube video, dancing in the carpark, unable to stop, not sure she’ll ever want to. “Deeper, deeper” you hear and you know that it will get deeper than this but you still can’t quite imagine what that deepness will feel like.

Some of this, “You Don’t Know (The Full Rose of Dawn)”, superficially sounds like relatively (ahem) straight and soft house, but it still constantly feels like it might fly apart at any moment. This is music that is in the process of frazzling, of what me and my mates used to call (in our callous, callow youth) Baretting. The vocals feel like they want to disappear, want to be twisted beyond recognition, need to stop a little while so the mind and body can start working together again in harmony.

I ought to say, this is a good thing, because maybe that’s not obvious. When “You Don’t Know” ends with a gentle piano refrain, you know the people on the dancefloor will feel suddenly and inexplicably grateful, in the exact way that we all felt grateful when the oboe finally rises out of the fogfucked sprawl and spasm of Coil’s “Chaostrophy”.

That the very next track is a version of that band’s “Anal Staircase” makes a perfect kind of sense and it’s an almost perfect version, almost a stop-gap between Horse Rotorvator and Love’s Secret Domain, a missing link in the chain, the music inside the head of Geoff and Peter when they were too busy partying to actually put anything down on record. When the Stravinsky sample appears in amongst the insistent horn stabs, it feels like a remembrance of things past – not just Coil, but Stravinsky too, with all the clamour he brought to the party. That same oboe might even appear briefly in the last track, though it may simply be the past leaking through too far.

You really need to be already on your way to properly appreciate what The Soft Pink Truth is doing here, but you can still imagine this on the most (de)based dancefloor, unaccompanied, because there is real songcraft permeating through every track. This hasn’t been simply knocked out; everything seems completely considered, the mixing, the tweaking, the placement.

You could whizz through this on Bandcamp or whatever and not really hear it at all, but if you do find yourself listening at 5am in whatever passes for a Shoom equivalent nowadays – I’m thinking a mysterious avenue of Shangri-La at Glastonbury or the Queef tent at Supernormal – then all three of your eyes will open and then close in a bliss that is simultaneously benevolent with just a sidereal-eye of playful malevolence. I ought to say, this is a very good thing.

-Loki-