Pale Meridian — The records
Visual concept preview of the Music Artist template's Music page: The discography: four records in order as painted sleeves, the liner-note story of the new one, and where each of them lives. The sections below are a non-interactive composition of open-registry blocks.
Four records in nine years, all on Laundrette Tapes, all recorded within a mile of the laundrette. The songs got quieter as the amps got better, which nobody predicted.
Oldest first, because that is the order the street heard them. The vinyl for all four is at the shows and on the shelf at the label.
The first one: nine songs recorded in six days, drums in the stairwell. Rough, hopeful, and still the loudest thing we have made.
The one written in the van. Ten songs about other people’s towns, with the first of Kit’s tape loops holding the seams together.
The quiet one. Made in a winter when nobody was sure the band would keep going; it is why the band kept going.
The new one: eleven songs, strings, the driers underneath. The first record that sounds like the room it was made in.
The title track was cut once, live, at four in the morning, with the streetlight doing through the blind exactly what it does on the cover. Nobody would let anybody fix the bass note in the second verse. It is the band’s favourite mistake to date.
We kept trying to record the songs somewhere better, and the songs kept sounding worse. So we carried everything back up the stairs, put the microphones where the damp had been, and got it in one take with the driers going. Home won.
Vesper Lindqvist, from the liner notes
All four records live on the listening services you already use, and the vinyl lives at the shows. The letters carry the early versions nothing else gets.
What the zines and the late shows said — every publication here is as invented as the band.
The best thing they have done, and the first one that sounds like the room it was made in. The driers deserve a credit.
Four records in and Pale Meridian still write like the last bus is coming. Sodium Lights is the sound of deciding not to run for it.
We played the title track three nights running and the phone lines did the rest. A record for everyone who has ever loved a street.
The Slow Hours was the sound of a band saving itself. Sodium Lights is what it saved. The strings on the seated nights will take your knees.
Juno Marsh remains the most interesting drummer in this scene — playing the songs, not the kit, and grinning about it.
Passing Places turned five this year and still smells of the van. That is a compliment. It has always been a compliment.
Demos, early versions, and the songs that never make the records go to the list first — usually with a note from whoever wrote them explaining what went wrong.