We’ve written about Mike Pace and the Child Actors several times here at VSF. After the demise of Brooklyn band Oxford Collapse at the end of the previous decade, Mike Pace decided to go solo, drawing from the celebratory energy that made Oxford Collapse so special and pushing further in various classic pop and rock directions. This resulted in a sound reminiscent of, but decidedly not, Oxford Collapse, a full-bodied throwback to an older musical age where larger-than-life characters wrote larger-than-life songs with the aim of enlarging the lives of the Average Joe. That is, the lives of you and I, or perhaps those of our parents.
Pace began with Best Boy back in 2015, what we labelled “feel-good songs tinged with longing” for kids of the 80s and 90s, and followed up with a double A-side single and an EP that followed a similar pattern. The former we described as sounding as though it “should be filmed for a live concert VHS-special,” and the latter, Get Soft, merged sophisti-pop and jazz fusion to sum up the Mike Pace aesthetic:
“Because Pace never leans more to one direction, [his music] feels like neither a sugary nostalgia-trip nor some ironic attack. Instead, and this could be said of the entire Child Actors output to date, it’s more a symbiosis between the two, a celebration that’s as interested in the fun banal stuff as it is with the more human centre.”
Which is to say, Pace’s music is nostalgic, but not in the common, empty way where recognition is exploited to shift units. Rather, he seems keyed in to the emotions and feelings that both create and maintain nostalgia, and thereby the reasons why it’s so enticing and thrilling. Such things cannot be condensed into simple explanations, but it seems pertinent that, beneath the familiar touchstones and flamboyant energy, Pace’s music is threaded with a vague yet persistent feeling of sadness, the knowledge that the present will soon be the past, and the past will now always be just that.
Smooth Sailing is a brand new full-length from Mike Pace and the Child Actors, and one which continues this distinctive examination. As always, the record sees Pace draw upon styles from the past, specifically, according to Daniel Kolitz’s bio, “progressive rock and big-tent singer-songwriter stuff from the 1970s.” Though that is a misleadingly reductive characterisation of the influences on show, as Smooth Sailing is a veritable banquet of retro delights, Pace jumping between sounds and styles from track to track in order to create a buffet of bizesized treats from all over the musical spectrum.
From opener ‘Everyone out of the Car’, with its tales of deadly snakes and big “woah oh oh” chorus, to squealing guitar rush of ‘Escape the Noise’, a track about leaving behind the glitz and glamour of rock ‘n roll, these songs are a joyous and unashamed ode to performers of the past. ‘Blaster’ is power pop, ‘Disconnected Heart’ a power ballad, and ‘Troubleshooting’ all round powerful, something between surf pop and bar band rock. There’s even a technicoloured instrumental in closer ‘Americana Manhasset’, a track for dusk or dawn someplace where sky meets road at the edge of the horizon, or rather the soundtrack for this place as seen through an 80s camera lens.
The result is almost postmodern, though without the the prevailing emptiness for which the movement is accused. Rather, Pace utilizes his eclectic and shape-shifting sound as a celebration of and part-eulogy to his array of influences, each change not undercutting the last but adding to a growing, album-wide attitude. Smooth Sailing, then, plays like a roulette wheel of vintage sounds, a jukebox as found at the wedding of an obscure uncle. Or perhaps an old radio from the seventies unearthed during a loft clearance, plugged in and found to be still tuned to frequencies of its time, a twirl of the dial cycling through the ghosts of stations past, each one dedicated to its own specific strain of classic rock joy.
We’re delighted to be able to stream the album in full, so grab your headphones and a pair of sunglasses, and prepare to set sail.
Smooth Sailing is out now and you can buy it from the Mike Pace and the Child Actors Bandcamp Page, including on cassette.
