Hats

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Hats (CD liner notes). The Blue Nile (remastereded.). Virgin Records. 2012. LKHCDR 2. {{ cite AV media notes}}: CS1 maint: others in cite AV media (notes) ( link) Other moments are equally reserved for thoughts about escaping the concrete jungle, such as ‘Headlights on the Parade’. Though lyrically not as dense, the instrumental paints the tale symmetrically, via a locomotive beat and elastic bass that together carry a cross-country momentum. All the while, elevated strings and an uplifting piano brings the type of excited peppiness that comes from venturing out in search of fresh surroundings. In a 2012 interview with ClashMusic.com, Buchanan reflected on the time lost trying to make the album: Larkin, Colin (2000). All Time Top 1000 Albums (3rded.). London: Virgin Books. p.137. ISBN 0-7535-0493-6.

For anyone looking to build their career and see the world moving forward at a frantic pace, they are instructed to live in the city, but few remember to tell of how mentally foreboding the prospect can be. Though the extreme condensity is thrilling from a newcomer’s perspective, everyone eventually feels that overwhelming entrapment, simultaneously compressed and left alone. Glaswegian band The Blue Nile, and particularly frontman and musical director Paul Buchanan, are deeply entrenched with this experience.From there, the fault lines make themselves more obviously known. At best, “Let’s Go Out Tonight” is the strung-out manifesto for a self-destructive couple; more likely, it’s a desperate plea to give everything one more shot, that one more night might relocate some sense of wonder. “Headlights On The Parade,” like “The Downtown Lights,” is the catchier side of Hats— and unlike most of the album, it’s where you could be lured into a sense of euphoria, as if it’s the moment where that wonder actually was recalled or reclaimed, that moment in a night out when you can temporarily fool yourself into thinking anything’s possible.

Blais-Billie, Braudie; Sodomsky, Sam (12 June 2018). "Pure Bathing Culture Cover the Blue Nile's Hats in Its Entirety". Pitchfork . Retrieved 13 November 2022. In more recent years, their name seems to keep reappearing — maybe not more frequently, exactly, but perhaps a new generation is finding them. Or, as impossible as it seems for anyone to sound like the Blue Nile, maybe their influence is more significant this time around. Artists with as much history as Destroyer and as freshly exciting as Westerman have been compared to them. The 1975’s Matty Healy has talked about listening to Hats constantly while crafting last year’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships; this year, Natasha Khan, an artist obviously well-versed in the ’80s, mentioned discovering them for the first time while working on the new Bat For Lashes album Lost Girls. Pure Bathing Culture covered the entirety of Hats last year; they were joined by Ben Gibbard on a couple songs. A couple months later, fellow Scots Chvrches offered their own rendition of “The Downtown Lights.” And Buchanan still reemerges as a co-writer from time to time, most recently on Jessie Ware’s Glasshouse in 2017.More importantly, as has been reaffirmed on this year’s stripped-down solo psalm Mid Air, Paul Buchanan’s enraptured voice and words capture the essence of hearts breaking and healing as well as anyone outside Tamla Motown’s heyday.