illusionofjoy | OTR: The Big Pink - A Brief History of Love

It comes roaring out of the gate immediately, all feedback and heavy reverb sounding like The Jesus & Mary Chain making sweet love to The Catherine Wheel, the first track of The Big Pink's debut album A Brief History of Love. With a title echoing those of - ahem - Echo & the Bunnymen, "Crystal Visions" screamed at me, "you will love this album!" The title cut which follows, "Too Young To Love" kept screaming.

Of course, I knew this band - a duo, actually - was something special when I heard the singles "Velvet" and "Dominoes" and saw the delightfully bondage-themed video to the former.

The Big Pink are signed to 4AD, a name not exactly unknown in the realm of dreampop and shoegaze (wink, wink). The cover art makes it look like a new release from This Mortal Coil what with it's newsprint greyscale focusing brightly on only one figure, in this case a nude woman whose flesh is so overexposed in the photograph that one can barely make out that her nipples are showing. I wonder if they sell this album at Wal-Mart? Irrelevant, really - I bought my copy from amazon.com. Hello, barely visible nipple.

I can hear the critics - "derivative," they accuse, pointing out obvious superficial comparisons to My Bloody Valentine. I've come to the conclusion that every band is derivative, in all honesty. Nothing springs completely anew...and I don't want it that way either. What a horrible shock to the system it would be if something completely new and alien were to jump out and ravage an unsuspecting public. We small-minded troglodytes wouldn't be able to handle it, truth be told.

What matters is that a band, a musician - any artist, really, is able to take the past and, instead of repeating it, building upon it. Strong songwriting gives a band a unique voice, regardless of whether or not they superficially sound like another group. I mean, really, for fuck's sake - the album is titled A Brief History of Love not Loveless. These are completely different sets of songs!

Not that I listen to as much new music as I used to, so I can't justify doing so, but if I did yearly top ten lists, A Brief History of Love would be up there. I admit: I am a sucker for any band that brings back the alternative 1980s and twists them into something new yet still comfortably familiar.