Pabloās Eye draw their inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioniās mysterious slow film classic LāAvventura, more specifically centring their vision through the eyes of the critic Richard Skinner, who in an essay entitled āAuteur of eerie angstā summarised the plot:
A group of friends go sailing and one disappears. The others start searching for her, but it gradually becomes apparent that she wonāt be found, so the friends return home one by one. Only the missing girlās lover and her best friend remain. They have begun an affair. As the lovers come together the girlās disappearance is all but forgotten.
Echoing the obscure languor of the film, on The light was sharp, our eyes were open ambient synth washes lurch with a wiry portent and slide guitar stretches out quixotically pensive soundscapes which from the Aeolian Islands to cobbled Sicilian streets and the Tiber which runs through the Italian capital shift from the sea to rain-soaked urbanity and back again, all the while viewed through a cracked window and a fluttering, diaphanous curtain with the prevailing mood enunciated through smears of soft-spoken word.
Beyond the aching centrepiece āThe dog days are long goneā, the quintet which includes Skinner plus Marie Mandi, Luc Laret, Thierry Royo and Axel Libeert offer a litany of names on āThe girls from Peoriaā, as a play on the faceless ubiquitousness of the onetime stop on the old vaudeville circuit. The industrial ambiance of āLocked awayā lingers somewhere between Throbbing Gristle and This Mortal Coil, the brassy reeds and elegiac guitar strums of āMysterious cityā are finally encompassed by an Angelo Badalamenti-themed Twin Peaks gloom, and the percussive rebound of āSonar Vestapolā opens up new portals as Pabloās Eye drift in the gully of the blues.
