This month’s featured band is Totnes, UK indie pop/indie rock band Pale Blue Eyes.
Comprised of Lucy Board (drums, synths), Matthew Board (guitar, vocals) and Aubrey Simpson (bass), PBE create a beguiling mixture of rhythmic post-punk and sophisticated pop with touchpoints that range from Krautrock to melodic synth pop.
Matt and Lucy were married in 2018, years after meeting at art college. The couple met Aubrey at South Devon’s Sea Change festival.
The band have produced albums and songs with other musicians in their own Totnes studio. To create the studio, they took out a bank loan and worked pretty much anywhere that would provide a wage – at a soup factory, at music festivals, in greenhouses and cinemas, running bars at disturbing corporate events, as a tree surgeon’s assistant.
“When we were younger, we recorded at various studios – from makeshift DIY places in Sheffield and Plymouth to residential studios like Rockfield in Wales. Rockfield was like heaven to us, but it was somewhere we could only afford for a couple of days. Our dream was to have more studio time, to develop songs without being ‘on the clock’, and to learn how to produce ourselves.”
Lucy
In time and with hard work, the PBE studio took shape.
Debut LP Souvenirs
The album is called Souvenirs because, as Lucy explains, “The songs encapsulate a few years’ worth of memories and experiences – times of change and personal sadness. The songs were an outlet for us and they now serve as souvenirs of all those times”.
The record, mixed and mastered by Dean Honer, moves from the melodious bass surge of Globe to the metal-bright guitar parts of Motionless and Under Northern Sky, where there are perhaps suggestions of Television and Echo And The Bunnymen’s Will Sergeant.
Ultimately, Souvenirs brims with a kind of elective positivity, as made clear when Matt lists the album’s themes: “Embracing good times, escapism, losing yourself in a moment of bliss when the world around you is going to shit… Processing and understanding loss and grief and using our music as a vehicle to move on… Fighting against the mundane and not giving up on dreams… Making the most of the time you have…”
Souvenirs is out now via Full Time Hobby. Grab it here.
Follow Pale Blue Eyes on
Facebook: facebook.com/paleblueeyesmusic
Twitter: twitter.com/pbemusic
Instagram: instagram.com/pbemusic
