Patience’s inspired synth pop debut LP depicts gleaming surfaces, yet delivers depth on the dancefloor as it digs at memory and melancholy underneath

Dizzy Spells is everything a pop record should be from the first pour into your consciousness. The opening pathway of “The Girls Are Chewing Gum” takes a slow-pulse “Blue Monday” course into a lyrically rich, deceptively light synth pop masterclass. Girls lean out of fire escapes and melt in the sun in a vivid outsider’s view of over-exposed Los Angeles. Roxanne Clifford (The Royal We, Veronica Falls) depicts surfaces throughout – whether synthesiser sheen or images conjured out of words – but she’s really interested in what lies behind the façade. Dizzy Spells offers depth on the dancefloor and dreams of escape from the quotidian now. 

Memory haunts “The Girls Are Chewing Gum”. “I remember all the things that I forgot”, Clifford sings, a replicant realisation within a bedroom anthem, “I remember everything that I am not”. “Living Things Don’t Last” makes following up lightning in a bottle look like the most natural thing in the world. The music becomes quieter, more reflective, with Clifford’s narrator an onlooker from the inside in. She’s situated behind windows – in a relationship distanced by glass, separated by buildings.

The first of the previously released (and long sold out) 7″ singles, “White of an Eye”, is uplifting melancholia perfected, its early 1980s indie-pop guitar lines casting an authentic, stylised mood. It has that living life at the very end of the world feeling embodied elsewhere in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X or Don McKellar’s underappreciated Last Night. When reality seems like a simulation “you joke and you wonder / Is the dream just a cover we’re under?”

Clifford’s deft wordplay and precise use of metaphor are on heightened display with “Aerosal”: “Confetti on the garden path / And my right foot’s a paperweight”. It’s intimate without disregarding that vision of a world apart at the seams. Another monolithic 7″, “The Church” is a surging howl into the backlit void, whilst “Moral Damage” is a French-English duet (with former Veronica Falls bandmate Marion Herbain) that fades away and radiates beautifully. “The Pressure” takes off with a Kraftwerkian blast towards the end of a night that still promises a tomorrow.

That the singles do not dominate the set is a marvel in itself, for this is an album that consistently delights. Patience navigates an uplifting experience of sadness, building upon elements of Veronica Falls, but going in new directions. The music here has the clean architectural lines of Julius Shulman’s photographs of modernist glass houses, but inside the figures, for all their sophistication, are in turmoil. Like New Order with a Grey Gardens heart then.

An exclusive edition with screenprinted poster is available from Monorail.

patienceworld.bandcamp.com

Stewart Gardiner
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