The Blue Nile signed the deal, moved by the genuine enthusiasm expressed by their benefactors. They recorded the seven songs on A Walk Across the Rooftops over the span of five months, living in a rented apartment until the money ran out, at which point they crashed with their producer, Calum Malcolm. Once they completed the record, they spent months tweaking it and waited a full year to release it. “Listen, I don’t think we ever recovered from the first record,” Moore reflected later on. “After those five months in the studio we could never really ever sit down together with it feeling like a pressure cooker. The unselfconsciousness was gone immediately.”
Part of the process was textbook perfectionism: assessing and reassessing the work to ensure it fulfilled its imagined potential. But the band also learned that the long gestation led to some of their best ideas. Most of the songs on A Walk Across the Rooftop began as basic compositions on guitar or piano, and you can imagine the more pop-leaning material like “Stay” or “Heatwave” slotting easily among the decade’s post-new wave balladry. The choruses are big and accessible, the melodies classically beautiful, their themes universal.
But what happens when you sit with a beautiful idea even longer? They spent a significant amount of time with a song called “Tinseltown in the Rain,” which pays tribute to Glasgow with some of their most timeless imagery and some of their best refrains: “Do I love you? Yes, I love you!” But as they listened to the way the melody flickered and swayed, ticked anxiously and reached toward the skies, they started seeing the song itself as a landscape. “In a sense that was the beginning of something,” Buchanan explained. “The bass goes down like a fire escape, PJ is making noises like tin roofs, we wanted that feeling of standing looking over a city. Without discussing it, that became what we were doing.”
And so, four decades later, A Walk Across the Rooftops still doesn’t sound like any variation on pop music it’s ever been saddled with: sophisti-pop, synth-pop, ambient pop, or what have you. Part of this was how and when it was made—state of the art but on a budget, between technological innovations—but also because of the compositions.
POsted from:https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-blue-nile-a-walk-across-the-rooftops/