Review Summary: Glitter is a short-lived paradise that takes you strolling without much sense of direction, allowing you idle moments of recuperation.
Japanese shoegaze—ala Oeil and Kinokoteikoku—seems to take on a form not unlike the solitary act of flying a kite. You find someplace beautiful to set yourself down, but you’re not forced to stay in one place. You allow yourself to run if you’d like, and no one is discouraging you from doing so. You have a choice to stay in place, using the focal point of the kite and the surrounding sounds of nature to put you at ease. In fact, it’s the idea that you’re attached to something, unable to fathom the idea of releasing it into thin air. You want to keep it held tightly, not wanting it to end, but knowing that the wind will die at some point in the day.
Glitter’s lateral form of progression does not at any point appear clipped or short-sighted. That is if such progress was able to be definitively tracked. Each song is earnest in a monosyllabic way, as gentle as a lullaby, or as indelible as the first time you hear “I love you.” A great emphasis is placed instrumentally on not being too impatient or jarring, which follows much of the fundamentals of shoegazing. “Shoegazer” and “Slowdive,” perhaps even refer to the impact the genre has had on Pasteboard. As the tracks begin to wind down, the album’s nascence becomes clearer. There’s this unwarranted feeling from the listener, to long to hear it for the first time again.
Ultimately, there is nothing in Pasteboard's discography to compare it to. Their other band, Roly Poly Rag Bear, seems to retain the good vibes, the plasma of the songs. But it seems the instruments are played with less delicacy. There is less mystery in how the songs make you feel apart from yourself. There is practically no information on these folks--they came, they saw, without any intention of conquering the genre.
To bring it back to flying a kite, I think there are many things in this life that might elude you when you meet them for the first time. Knowing that a stranger is simply a vague face in your mind, a purchase is simply an item to add to your shelf, a cup of coffee will be waiting for you the next morning. There’s joy in all these things, sure, but an enigmatic joy. Every time we partake in something, there is a silkscreen that appears over the memory of the last time. The more you listen to Glitter, the more you’ll want to stabilize it with something familiar. I believe I am one of the runners, one of the seekers that take the kite into woods until it’s tattered to smithereens. If I decide to release it, I will be remiss to let its memory go to waste. On a windless day, as I cut the string, letting the cloth of the kite drift down into the dirt, I will clench the spool in my hand. The kite will stay there as long as it can until it too will fade away. The next time I get a kite and set it to the wind, I will remember that first one. They will kind of blend into each other. Perhaps that’s why I get so emotional when I listen to shoegaze. I can remember the first note but can never recall the presence of the last.
