Hmmm, Something Naughty, Eh? “Sex is Like Snow; You Never Know How Many…” Oh Sorry! This Story Is About a Pastels and Tenniscoats Album, Not a Pasties and Teninchpenisthroats Album!

Don't you love it when the man least likely becomes a hero? Few would have bet on Stephen Pastel (né McRobbie) to influence legions of spotty-faced followers when he started playing music as The Pastels back in the early 1980s but, as any scamdicapper will tell you as he pockets the deed to your house, betting is a suckers game. Copycatting being the sincerest form of flattery and all that aside, The Pastels gave up the ghost of the embarrassingly clique-y C86 scene shortly after 1986 and have released a string of idiosyncratically brilliant, frustratingly infrequent albums that have managed to simultaneously rub the brain muscle and tug the love muscle since. Recovering indie gamblers will fight the urge to jump back in the fray with news that the original high-rolling exploration team of Pastel and Katrina Mitchell will return with a new album not in the murky "near future" but in the eyeball-singeing "near now." Next week, in fact!

For their latest record Pastel and Mitchell have recorded with their Japanese spiritual muso-twins, Saya and Takashi Ueno, a.k.a. Tenniscoats, and frequent doppelgangers like Norman Blake and Gerard Love (Teenage Fanclub), Bill Wells, and Tom Crossley (International Airport). Two Sunsets will be available on September 22 in North America via the Pastels-navigated arm of Domino Records, Geographic, and is a, not the, follow up to their most recent album, a soundtrack to The Last Great Wilderness (issued in 2003). This inspired Tenniscoats/Pastels collaboration is already out in the U.K., as is the first single, "Vivid Youth," which features the double duos' heart-touched version of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s "About You" on the B-side.

As far as a new exclusively Pastels record is concerned, there is no firm news on that front as yet besides the fact that there is indeed one in the works. Patience, patience... good always wins out and comes to those who wait. When it does come you can bet the farm on it wiping the floor with the current crop of overhyped crap shooters.

Two Suns tracklisting:

1. Tokyo Glasgow
2. Two Sunsets
3. Song for a Friend
4. Vivid Youth
5. Yomigaeru
6. Modesty Piece
7. About You
8. Boats
9. Hikoki
10. Sodane
11. Mou Mou Rainbow
12. Start Slowly So We Sound Like a Loch

One is the loneliest number of upcoming Pastels shows:
11.27.09 - Glasgow, Scotland - King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut

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