PALE SAINTS - IN RIBBONS Vinyl LP
An expanded reissue of Pale Saints' 1992 album In Ribbons. Missing its original release date last year due to Covid delays and production plant woes, the record, which Pitchfork named one of The Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time, is finally getting the 30th Anniversary celebration it deserves with a special double LP / CD release.
The first disc features the UK version of the album with the second featuring a bonus disc of never before heard demos that includes their first attempt at Slapp Happy’s “Blue Flower” and Ian Masters’ rare 4 track recording of their beloved Nancy Sinatra cover “Kinky Love." Additionally the bonus disc features two brass band versions by The Tintwistle Band (previously only heard on a limited, bonus 7” with the initial UK LP pressing).
Coming in a beautiful gatefold sleeve, the limited double LP edition is being pressed on unpigmented vinyl by The Vinyl Factory in West London. A single disc, black vinyl version is also being released, as well as a double CD edition.
The 1990 debut album from Pale Saints, The Comforts of Madness, is an outstanding record that owed as much to post-punk and L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene than it did to shoegaze. The Sunday Times called it “an unintended indie manifesto: music that is at once wayward and concise, dissonant and beautiful.”
Shortly after its release and in need of a second live guitarist, Lush founding member Meriel Barham joined the Leeds trio of Ian Masters, Graeme Naysmith and Chris Cooper, bringing a new dynamic to the band.
Having previously worked well on 1991’s Flesh Balloon EP with producer Hugh Jones (Echo & The Bunnyman, Modern English, The Sound), he did a brilliant job capturing their second album, In Ribbons (1992), despite some studio tensions. Brooklyn Vegan said in a recent celebration of the album that it was the “push and pull between Masters’ outsider tendencies and (the rest’s) commercial interests that makes In Ribbons so good. If some of the wild, ragged edges of Comforts of Madness have been smoothed off, the album makes up for it with scope and beauty. And there’s still no shortage of weird.”