Pablo’s Eye draw their inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni’s mysterious slow film classic L’Avventura, more specifically centring their vision through the eyes of the critic Richard Skinner, who in an essay entitled ‘Auteur of eerie angst’ 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 won’t be found, so the friends return home one by one. Only the missing girl’s lover and her best friend remain. They have begun an affair. As the lovers come together the girl’s 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 ‘The dog days are long gone’, the quintet which includes Skinner plus Marie Mandi, Luc Laret, Thierry Royo and Axel Libeert offer a litany of names on ‘The girls from Peoria’, as a play on the faceless ubiquitousness of the onetime stop on the old vaudeville circuit. The industrial ambiance of ‘Locked away’ lingers somewhere between Throbbing Gristle and This Mortal Coil, the brassy reeds and elegiac guitar strums of ‘Mysterious city’ are finally encompassed by an Angelo Badalamenti-themed Twin Peaks gloom, and the percussive rebound of ‘Sonar Vestapol’ opens up new portals as Pablo’s Eye drift in the gully of the blues.
