Monday 4 May 2015

Pleasure Beach - Go


This is the story of a 21st century mystery. It isn't a mystery on the same level as the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, and it sure as heck won't be remembered in the years to come (I'd actually be surprised if you remember it the moment you click away from this page), but it's a mystery nonetheless.

Last week, the band Pleasure Beach appeared on my Twitter feed, announcing the release of their debut single, "Go". This came as a surprise to me, as it wasn't a sponsored Tweet, and I had no recollection of ever following a band of that name. So what happened?

My first thoughts was that for some reason, Twitter had decided, in their infinite wisdom, that Pleasure Beach were a band that I absolutely, positively, must have to follow, because their music will change my life in ways that I couldn't possibly imagine. There's would have been some precedence to this, as the same week Q Magazine had been added to my Twitter feed, despite the fact that a) I hadn't followed them, and b) am not middle-aged.

But even so, I thought it would be unlikely that a new band would have the necessary financial power to get a multi-billion company to exploit their algorithms on their behalf, which led me to my second hypothesis - were Pleasure Beach formed from the ashes of another band that I had followed in the past? Having learned that the band were from Northern Ireland, this seemed like the obvious conclusion. However, after going through some of the bands that we'd covered in the past who'd split up whose sound could be comparable with that of the new band (some of our possible contenders included The Alice Kona Band and Amateur Historians), and with none of the increasing number of blogs who had written about the band able to shed some light on it, I gave up my sleuthing, leaving the outcome of this case open.

Or at least until last week, when the wonderful people on BBC Radio Ulster's Across The Line were able to answer the question that had been plaguing me for hours - the band is a continuation of Yes Cadets. They were a band very close to this blog's heart - we even wrote about them the very first day this blog was active, and given that we hadn't heard about them since they supported Public Service Broadcasting at the tail end of 2013, we thought that they'd probably called time on the band. And so, the pieces had finally come together.

Now that our mystery is solved, we're delighted for two reasons - firstly that they're still making music, and that if "Go" is anything to go by, the music that they're going to make as Pleasure Beach going to be of a very high calibre. Compared to the more electronic/indie sound that they made as YC,  as Pleasure Beach they are making electronically-tinged Springsteen-esque American rock, not too dissimilar to what The War of Drugs have done to much aplomb. "Go" has already started to get a lot of people excited about the band, and now they can add one more person to the mix.

Just let me know the next time you decide to change on me, please?

"Go" is due to be released on May 25th as a Double A-side with "Absentee".

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