Pink Playground dance around the fringes of a lot of shoegaze’s leading lights — My Bloody Valentine most prominently — and the question is: do they simply carbon-copy the material they’re influenced by or assist in driving the aesthetic ahead? If the audio slinking from Destination Ecstasy is any indication, the troupe fall into the latter category along with other groups taking up the same challenge (Skywave, The Telescopes, BJM circa My Bloody Underground).
Most impressive on Destination Ecstasy is the production, which brings with it a hearty helping of droning soundscapes so impenetrable it’s barely possible to hear Tara Tyson through the gauze, as if her voice is precious fruit and a screen has been placed over it to deflect fruit flies and/or ninjas. In fact, it’s tough to even hear what the focal point of the mix is. The ribbons of electric drawl? The foundation of guitar? Certainly not the drums, as they exist mostly to provide a frame of rhythmic reference. So what are our ears to latch onto? Therein, of course, lies the rub: Pink Playground want you to hear the compositions as a whole.
It’s difficult not to feel as if one is being distracted from the Meat of the Music, yet the package shimmers with the sort of dreampop tension Blonde Redhead would seemingly sacrifice one of the Pace twins to attain, along with several other acts that have tried to spruce up their projects with similar dressings and failed (lesser lights like Asobi Seksu, for example) to reach the next level. With a few cassettes and 7-inches to their name, Destination Ecstasy represents Pink Playground’s maiden full-length voyage; with this much quality attained already, it’s scary to think of the damage they’ll do if they continue to work at constructing a product that sounds like it’s been tinkered with for decades — Kevin Shields is washing his hands somewhere at the thought of this — yet in reality simply represents what they do.
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