The Blue Nile - Hats (1989)
1 - Over the Hillside 5:05
2 - The Downtown Lights 6:29
3 - Let's Go Out Tonight 5:16
4 - Headlights on the Parade 6:16
5 - From a Late Night Train 4:01
6 - Seven A.M. 5:09
7 - Saturday Night 6:27
"This album was a one-off. The music comes out raw, tender, vulnerable, hard, achingly human, logical and, on the wrong days, almost unbearably emotional.
The songs on Hats are stripped bare. Tempos are, for the most part, hypnotically slow. Sparse drums, the barest skeletons of structure sketched in on tinkling pianos, occasional pastel washes of synthetic strings, and Paul Buchanan's haunted voice carrying fragile strands of melody that melt away into the backdrop before you've quite grasped them.
It's almost like they spent time in making the record deciding how much they could leave out and still have enough meat and bone to allow the songs to stand up.
Lyrically, too, less is more. Standard American songwriting cliches involving headlights, trains rolling round bends, times of day, weather conditions, are employed knowingly, using their comfortable warmth to set the listener up for the drop into a bleak abyss of angst and loneliness.
Music and lyrics combine to create one solitary atmosphere, the feeling of loss, the feeling we all share and don't ever know why.
Fortunately, nestling in all this loneliness, there's solace. There's knowing that somebody else feels it too, and lives with it. There's the closing track, "Saturday Night", in which Buchanan celebrates the ordinary girl who can make everything all right.
If Hats has a flaw, it's only that it is too perfect, too considered.
I commend this record to house and to all concerned."
