“Music large and loud and lively, the kind of great so-serious-its-not (or maybe so non-serious-its-serious) energy that should be filmed for a live concert VHS-special”

Not content to stop there, the intervening months have seen Pace looking for ways to further flesh out his sound. The answer to moving forward it seemed, involving digging through the past, gathering the multitude of loose ends that constitute his favourite hits and weaving them into one long and complicated rope. As Pace describes: “For this latest batch of tunes, I figured since I’m probably never performing live again, why not indulge my myriad musical tastes by jumping headfirst into hard-to-replicate mini-epics?”

Get Soft is the resulting EP, a release of four songs which “travel from sleek mid 80’s inspired ‘sophisti-pop’ to smooth jazz fusion to mid-tempo psych groove-fests to melancholy synthesized mediations and back.” If this sounds quite the journey then that’s because it is, packing the sort of energy unique to pre-millennium TV, where everything is loud and bright and bursting with positivity.

Opener ‘Audits & Surveys’ is the perfect example, kicking things off like some glorious new dawn of old feelings. With lead vocals by Alana Amram, the track plays like an early 90s corporate lifestyle, maintaining a flashy optimism that seems both genuine and not, as though beneath this world of surfaces lies a fear or dissatisfaction that triggers not some deep existential demise but rather a deeper love of the shiny top layer. So while the lyrics are packed with self-deprecation and regret, the music itself never slips from its jubilant tone, and, because Pace never leans more to one direction, the track 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.

“I cut corners like a real close shave
Business casual is my middle name
I may look like a fool but I’m really a knave
four out of five would agree”

The title track plays like the theme to the best sunny cop farce never written, Adam Swierczynski and Ian Evans setting the tempo with bass and drums before the delightfully big guitar finale. ‘Caravan the Coast’ sees Lira Yin offer dreamy backing vocals, the track a glad-to-be-alive ode to cross country travelling, and a pop number for optimists more generally. There’s more than a hint of melodrama behind the buoyancy (the enthusiasm for utopian escape must suggest there’s something to run away from, after all), though again Pace refuses to let the elated tone slip, the track building into a frenetic crescendo which serves as a figurative ride into the sunset, even if a literal one is some way off.

“Soon enough we’ll be somewhere warm just beyond the chill
Caught outside in a summer storm
Like you hope we would

Long time leaving – tougher than most
But I’d love to have you join me
Join me as we caravan the coast”

The electronic instrumental ‘Eleuthera’ closes the release with a slice of digital tropicana, perhaps the clearest sign of melancholy on the record. However, with its swelling synths providing a near-spiritual promise of sustenance, it’s unclear whether it’s that late-evening vacation sort of emotion that’s somehow linked to transcendence, or a deeper sadness triggered by the confrontation of yet another image. Maybe the seascape here is being beamed from the fogged-up window of a travel agency’s concrete office, the warmth on your face merely the promise of sun, or just radiation from the screen’s cathode glow.

Get Soft is out now and you can get it on a ‘name your price’ basis via the Mike Pace Bandcamp page.

Cover photography by Greg Andreacchi

The post Mike Pace & The Child Actors – Get Soft appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“Best Boy is for the children of the 80s and 90s, reminiscing about the age where entertainment exploded, where VHS tapes and cable TV transformed us into constant consumers… a wistful celebration of what we had [which] presents some convincing reasons for why we feel the way we do”

Pace is back with a double A-side single which may or may not have been recorded at The Rolling Stones Mobile Recording Unit with the help of “a murderers’ row of jazz ­fusion session talent” including Bill “Church” Wellington (keyboards), Du’vel DiGiorgio (bass), Coke Stevenson (trumpet), Tony Kukoc (soprano guitar) and Dan Van Dyke (drums), the non-fictitious Lira Yin (vocals) and producer Matt LeMay. The release sees Pace expand on the new direction hinted at on Best Boy, pushing toward a more expansive, poppy sound. As he explains:  

To paraphrase REO Speedwagon, badly, it was ‘time for me to [spread my wings and] fly, musically. I don’t really play live these days. I have a young family. I exclusively buy bargain bin progressive and AOR records. I recently got really into tennis. In other words, I like to push the boundaries, and I may as well use all of these things to help  inform and craft my new songs.

The release opens with ‘The Flood’, giving the first taste of the new boundary-pushing Child Actors. Opening with sparkling synths, the track develops into a jubilant pop song which finds glory in a seemingly miserable/dangerous life (the opening line, for example: “Here comes the drugs wash over me/their wake will take us out to sea”). Right up to the final triumphant horns and keyboards, the track does not let up in its elation, pushing a Hold Steady brand of transcendental joy/love, the sort which creeps through the cracks of a life filled with high stakes and morning afters.

“Here come the drums, rain over me stuttering start of the daylight dawning
fathers yell and mothers weep crawl on our knees soon enough we’re walking shed a tear at ‘Hey Nineteen’ another love crashed in-between

Open the floodgates, cut us loose then we’ll catch our stride
Close your eyes and stay by my side the realest thing that you can do tonight”

Second single ‘Red Sauce Revisited’ combines the various ingredients of radio hits from through the ages, opening with 60s surf strums and touching upon 70s rock solos, 80s power pop cheese and 90s melodrama to become a four and a half minute singalong homage to the good old FM stations of the US of A.

“Signs are on the ceiling, writing’s on the wall
There’s a terrifying feeling I won’t see you anymore
and I cannot stop the bleeding so I’ll learn to love the pain
I never thought that this is how it ends”

So basically, if you like your music large and loud and lively, the kind of great so-serious-its-not (or maybe so non-serious-its-serious) energy that should be filmed for a live concert VHS-special, look no further. Michael Pace has arrived, and he has company.

The Flood / Red Sauce Revisited is available for download on a pay-what-you-can basis via Bandcamp.

The post Première: Double A-side single from Mike Pace and the Child Actors appeared first on Various Small Flames.