Pastel Blank

Pastel Blank revolves around the songs and voice of songwriter Angus Watt. It is brought to life by an ever-shifting cast of musicians and recurring collaborators from Montréal, Vancouver, and Victoria, and exists somewhere between a “solo” project and a band. Pastel Blank cloaks experimentation in pop-minded song structure; the sheen and gloss of a disco ball glints off the edges of sharp, angular post-punk sensibilities. The groove is a morse code stutter; there is funkiness, but it is tempered by a wide-eyed nervousness, as if the songs themselves aren’t sure what will happen next. The result is a warped fun house mirror of referentialism; a collage of sounds that are at once familiar and yet also slightly alien in their combination. Their debut LP, Unmade In Minutes (via Paper Bag Records) was produced by Connor Head and Angus Watt, and mixed by Austin Tufts (BRAIDS). The album expands upon the guitar driven lo-fi indie rock of their first EP, Pastel Blanc, incorporating thick layers of percussion, woozy synthesizers, oddball samples, and flurries of saxophone and flute. The result is a polished set of genre-blending songs that embrace maximalist cubist chaos while staying locked in to the central tenet of groove: a key component of Pastel Blank’s incendiary live show. This time around, the songs are more pointed, their tone more sardonic, revolving around ideas of self-control and agency in a world where our neurological control boards are being bid on by bad-faith actors. In Radiator, things are heating up and our level of free will is questioned; in Dopamine, attention is held captive by our dark relationship with our screens, profit is weighed out against human life in Shareholder, and the more that stress compounds, the stronger the craving for sweet, sweet nicotine. Fiction questions if we really know ourselves anymore, or if our memories are just arranged into the story we’d like to believe. In Big Man, the façade of masculinity is ailing; no longer can anger be the only vessel for expressing all other emotions. Do we make ourselves, or are we made into the driver of our very own automotive vehicle, driving on lab-rat freeways? Pastel Blank offers an opportunity for catharsis: today’s anxieties become tonight’s reason to dance. This transfer of energy is necessary to alleviate the woes of watching the world stage as funding for the arts predictably gets slashed again. Recorded at Catalogue Studios in Victoria, the goal for the album sessions was to capture the sweaty buzz of Pastel Blank’s live show. The songs were largely written in isolation and brought in as “sketchy LEGO structures”; demos with guitars, bass, vocals, and keys sketched out by Watt, and then sent to Oliver Hollingshead, whose unique drumming brought the songs a step closer to existence. At the time of recording, Pastel Blank had recently started playing live as a six-piece, intersecting