Rat Columns - Pacific Kiss

Not many years pass by without some kind of musical contribution from David West, and, like Fall records, here he is again as Rat Columns, perhaps his most perfectly realised form. Well, my favourite, at least. Rat Columns is, ostensibly, a pop band, albeit the kind of underground alterna-pop band as first imagined circa 1984 and ossified around C86. With Pacific Kiss, DW serves up his boldest and most extroverted collection to date, a lost Creation classic of Revolving Paint Dream/Servants power pop. West is certainly a DIY-or-die punker in spirit, as his stints in Burning Sensation and Total Control attest, but he's also got a pretty defined instinct for open-hearted romanticism and unabashed melodicism that seems born of another world -in a sense it's like an international pop underground imagining of that old adage that 95% of great pop music is about love and/or dancing. Never one to shy away from heart on his sleeve declarations, Pacific Kiss does nonetheless feel particularly poignant and personal - I Can't Live on Love, Feeding the Fire, She's Coming Home all seem to spark from the same troubled-love origins, good old bright and erudite earnest indiepop. But it's the Soul Kiss I and II tagteam that close the second side where the album really soars, the latter recalling the VU chug of early RC classic, 'Fooling Around'. Along with Cindy, Reds, Pinks and Purples et al, this is The New Sincerity of indiepop. And there aint no shade without sunshine.