Pale Meadow by Brian Grainger

For the second single from the Summer's Parting Ways LP, Brian Grainger's "Pale Meadow" offers a moody new wave jaunt through the beachside arcades, boulevard nightlife and tourist-town isolation of his upbringing in Myrtle Beach - mockingly referred to as "The Bland Strand" by Brian and his friends during the aching and mostly miserable years he spent there. "Pale Meadow" instrumentally explores now-vanished amusement parks like the Pavilion, or the now-swampland that once was Lake Busbee, through the memory-eyes of stoned, poolhopping kids, bored in a sad Summer, surrounded by neon, humidity and shallow seasonal escapism, all a pretty distraction from the fact that real escape was and is nearly impossible in such a place. Perhaps it's always this way, in youth, forever feeling like the world just out of your reach is the place you truly belong to. Nothing left to ponder as you zone out staring at the surface of the pool under the hotel lights, every night the same as the last, but you think about it all the same. "Pale Meadow" is the convergence of that resignation and the wishing for more, dissonant and colliding, just like the Blue Wheatfield, endless strumming fanfares for those downhearted nights that were the entire world, for a time, while the urgency of the future and the defiance of the now presses on as only youthful naivete can, regardless of cost or outcome. It has led us here, where the "Pale Meadow" opens up for all of us, and jumping in the back seat for the ride this time is Night Sequels, who brought his own mixtape along, a mutant nightclubbed version of "Swamp Bike" from the Highschool Guitar 12", which provides a momentary delirium before the lucid moment creeps back in with "Frayed Hem", a long slow curtain that drapes down in the form of an Eight Thousander-style guitar loop meditation, a willful erasing of the tape reel in your brain, fuzzy and out of focus, repetition as ritual and exorcism. 30 minutes of spaced-out bedroom guitar music that follows the sad magic of Summer's Parting Ways with another branching path.

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