By 2021, Rat Columns no longer sound like a group testing how many shadows can fit inside a jangling guitar song. The shadows remain, but someone has opened the windows.
Pacific Kiss is brighter, fuller and more immediately generous than the earlier Rat Columns records in this sequence. Where Sceptre Hole often seemed to arrive through fog and Fooling Around lingered inside uncertainty, this album walks forward with the confidence of a band that has learned pleasure does not need to be defended. The guitars ring clearly, keyboards add color rather than mystery, and the rhythm section gives the songs a physical bounce that earlier recordings sometimes deliberately withheld.
The opening track, “Hey! I Wanna Give You the World,” states that change almost comically fast. It lasts less than two minutes, but its title contains the scale of a grand romantic promise while the music delivers it with the efficiency of a postcard. There is no long atmospheric entrance and no need to establish credentials. The record simply begins in motion, cheerful enough to sound spontaneous but constructed carefully enough that every entrance lands where it should.
That economy continues through the first half. “It’s Your Time (to Suffer)” places one of David West’s characteristically gloomy titles inside music that refuses to behave miserably. Rat Columns have always understood that a sad idea can become more affecting when it is not accompanied by the expected sad costume. The melody moves, the keyboards glow, and the song’s emotional unease travels inside a body that appears capable of dancing.
“I Can’t Live on Love” continues the contradiction. The phrase sounds like a correction delivered after somebody has mistaken romantic intensity for shelter, food, money or a workable future. Yet the arrangement is buoyant rather than bitter. Rat Columns rarely separate hope and disappointment into different containers. Their songs understand that affection can be real while remaining insufficient, and that recognizing its limits does not erase its beauty.
Joey Fishman’s keyboards are essential to the album’s new openness. They do not overwhelm the guitars or turn the record into synth-pop, but they provide flashes of brightness that make the songs seem wider. At times the keys resemble sunlight reflecting from a moving car window: visible for only a moment, but enough to change the color of everything nearby. Amber Gempton and Raven Mahon’s backing vocals create a similar expansion. West’s voice often carries a private, slightly withdrawn quality; when other voices appear around him, the songs begin to feel communal without losing their inward center.
“No Stranger to Life” may be the title that best describes the record’s tone. It does not claim mastery over life, only familiarity with its repetitions and disappointments. The song sounds experienced without becoming exhausted. That balance is difficult to achieve. Many records built from older independent-pop languages either attempt to recreate youthful innocence or lean heavily into adult resignation. Pacific Kiss chooses neither. It sounds like people who have lived long enough to recognize recurring trouble but still find the world capable of producing a good chorus.
The album was largely made in an East Williamsburg rehearsal space described by the label as dingy but comfortable, and that setting suits the sound. This is not luxury-studio polish. The music retains the directness of people playing together in a functional room, but the arrangements are clean enough that the separate personalities remain audible. Max Schneider-Schumacher’s bass frequently carries more melodic responsibility than casual listening might reveal, while Dylan Stjepovic’s drumming gives the brighter material its certainty. The songs do not merely shimmer above the ground; they have legs.
“Candlelight” slows the forward rush without abandoning the album’s warmth. The title could suggest intimacy, nostalgia or the flattering light in which objects become more beautiful because their edges are less visible. Rat Columns have always been skilled with blurred edges, but here the blur feels less defensive. The record is willing to be seen. Even its quieter passages possess a clarity that distinguishes them from the murkier rooms of the earlier work.
“She’s Coming Home,” the album’s longest conventional song, is given enough time to settle into its repetitions. Five minutes is hardly excessive, but in a record filled with compact pop constructions it feels spacious. The song stretches without losing form, allowing the band’s chemistry to become the subject. Repetition is no longer a corridor leading into abstraction, as it sometimes was on Sceptre Hole. Here it feels like anticipation, the same thought returning because the awaited arrival has not yet occurred.
The title Pacific Kiss beautifully describes the record’s combination of geography and intimacy. “Pacific” suggests an ocean, enormous distance, the Australian west coast, and the routes connecting Perth to San Francisco and New York. “Kiss” reduces that scale to the smallest physical exchange between two people. The title joins a body of water too large to comprehend with an action lasting only a moment.
That contrast suits David West’s musical life. Rat Columns has existed across cities and with changing groups of collaborators, but the songs rarely advertise themselves as grand international statements. They remain modest and personal even when their creation involves musicians separated by continents. Pacific Kiss was engineered between New York and Perth and mixed by Mikey Young in Victoria, giving the record a scattered geography that never sounds fragmented.
“Feeding the Fire” briefly raises the heat before the album moves into its strangest section. The final three pieces, “Soul Kiss I,” “Athens,” and “Soul Kiss II,” alter the proportions of the record. After a sequence of relatively concise songs, “Athens” extends past seven minutes and sits between the two “Soul Kiss” pieces like a large island between related shores.
This closing sequence prevents Pacific Kiss from becoming merely a successful collection of bright indie-pop songs. Rat Columns still want an opening into somewhere less stable. “Soul Kiss I” loosens the album’s grip on conventional structure, and “Athens” gives the band room to drift, repeat and gradually reshape the listener’s sense of time. The title “Athens” may indicate a real city, an imagined place or simply a word attached to the music, but the track feels geographic. It suggests travel through a landscape rather than progress through verses and choruses.
Jef Brown’s saxophone and Mikey Young’s unusual guitar contributions help give these edges additional color. Young’s involvement is particularly appropriate because he has spent years recording, mixing and playing within Australian underground music, often helping bands sound more sharply themselves rather than imposing one recognizable production formula. His mix lets Pacific Kiss remain polished without becoming airless.
The return of “Soul Kiss II” after “Athens” creates the sensation of arriving at a related location from another direction. The album does not end with its largest pop hook or a dramatic emotional conclusion. It leaves through atmosphere, reminding us that the clarity of the earlier songs was a choice rather than a limitation. Rat Columns can still blur the frame whenever they choose.
Listening to these three releases in order reveals genuine development. Sceptre Hole moves between noise, pop and small instrumental passages as though discovering the boundaries of the project. Fooling Around gathers displaced recordings and gives uncertainty a temporary home. Pacific Kiss sounds less concerned with protecting its private world. It steps outside and discovers that brightness can carry complexity just as effectively as fog.
That does not mean the sadness has disappeared. It has been integrated. Earlier Rat Columns songs sometimes sounded as though melody were trying to survive the surrounding gloom. On Pacific Kiss, melody has survived long enough to become confident, but it remembers where it came from. Even the happiest moments contain the slight emotional tilt that makes West’s writing recognizable.
This is why the record avoids becoming shallow power pop. The immediate choruses and polished surfaces are not a retreat from the earlier work. They are the result of it. A musician can spend years learning how to make uncertainty audible and then discover that one of the hardest things to express honestly is uncomplicated pleasure. Pacific Kiss allows itself more pleasure than before, but it never mistakes brightness for simplicity.
The future is getting better here too, although the record does not need us to announce it on its behalf. The evidence is in the playing. A band can absorb decades of jangling guitars, post-punk reserve, power-pop precision and homemade experimentation, then produce something that feels neither nostalgic nor embarrassed by beauty.
Pacific Kiss does not argue for its place.
It opens the window and plays.
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