Pale Saints
The Comforts Of Madness

There are endless days, and just as no two snowflakes are alike, neither are days identical. However, they can be grouped into sets: perfect as Lou Reed said, bad as defined by the late REM, strange as experienced by Franco Battiato, wonderful as sung by U2, better than others as strummed by Lùnapop under the welcomed suggestion from the Ocean Colour Scene, of wrath like those first by Tonino Valerii and then by Federico Fiumani, nostalgic like the last video clip by Freddie Mercury, odd when played by Ludovico Einaudi. Whatever they may be though, one certainty remains: the evening always arrives. It's like an anchor that gives you stability when you're drifting at sea; you drop it and stay still waiting for dawn; all you need is a blanket and the roulette of tomorrow starts spinning again. So I lie in bed, fall asleep, dream, wake up, the dream is over.

Thrown there in the middle, at an unknown and blurred hour of the night, are the Pale Saints. Dragged out from the window, perhaps opened for the last days of the year, a thought returns to July, full of days that only had to begin and end: all so similar, never all the same. The Pale Saints find body and form only from a certain small hour onwards until the sun rises, outside of this slight time arc they do not exist, you search for them on store shelves and find emptiness, the radio doesn’t play them, every search crashes on the rocks until there’s light. Saying no is lying. Then when another moment begins, with the sun out, here they materialize: Ian Masters (bass and voice), Graeme Naysmith (guitar), and Chris Cooper (drums), three angels in the dark. In Leeds, I bet, no one has ever seen them around during the day.

"The Comforts Of Madness" was released in 1990, and over the last two decades, they’ve churned up Totò Schillaci's magical nights so much that now, every time that year is mentioned, my mind brings back images of Maradona's tears after the final whistle that closed the finale against Lothar Matthäus’s West Germany. The last beautiful World Cup, an echo of the positivism of the just-ended decade that never again resurfaced. I also remember the context, a holiday home in Marina di Massa, and the faces of the people I had around me at my 8 years, faces that, after seeing the award ceremony, told me to go to Eugenio to get an ice cream. As a side note, when I hear "Un'estate italiana", I might get emotional, while both Nannini and Bennato have always said that song was crap. Side note over.

Taking inspiration from the Shoegaze masters of a still-present past (The Jesus and Mary Chain in full activity, and the My Bloody Valentine who had yet to release their masterpiece), the Pale Saints color the sound with strongly Dream Pop hues so as to locate themselves in a single scenario: that of the dream, always an elusive parallel dimension. The initial gallop "Way The World Is" is a noisy door open to a world that will be yours for a few hours, from "You Tear The World In Two" which recalls that jumbled nightly reality, devoid of cause-effect logic, to "Sight Of You", born at the end of a thousand sidereal visions, from "Sea Of Sound" where I imagine in sequence a medieval knight, a kindergarten teacher, a bouquet of roses, a tangerine, to the pure Shoegaze of "A Deep Sleep For Steven" made of frames of people with closed eyes and the airport lights, from the Indie "Insubstantial" to the Noise Pop of "True Coming Dream". These are the comforts of madness. And listening to the ethereal voice of Ian Masters on "Language Of Flowers" trying to remind us how the 80s were, how can you not love it even for just almost 3 minutes? Eleven stars, a new design, a constellation. "Time Thief" ends, alternating noise and silence, like a perfect physical law.

A dream, yes, the kind you remember in fragments when you wake up.