Pale Air Singers

A collaborative recording project between The Cape May and Run Chico Run, the Pale Air Singers’ debut album is rich with layered, vocal harmonies and complex interplay of rhythm and instrumentation. The album, recorded in two intensive and blurry sessions in the band's respective locations in Calgary and Victoria, hints at the output of either band while reaching a place where neither have ever travelled. Written and recorded in an improvisational fashion with very few expectations on genre or style, the Pale Air Singers' debut is swaggering, leering and triumphant.

Smooth, interweaving guitars, gloomy trumpet spells, vaudevillian keyboards, and scattered, dub-like drum shuffles punctuate the album, while the vocalists from both bands weave stories of unrequited passion and too-soon-forgotten outcasts. The Pale Air Singer’s S/T album showcases Clinton St. John's distinctive voice as it evokes character-driven, multi-faceted stories; elsewhere the vocals of Matt Skillings and Thomas Shields take these characters through a landscape of cabaret-infused pop layered with delicate voices, all tied together in a creative haze.

The album opens with an stomping rhythm, the sound of boots on a piano body in an old garage; here, St. John's warm throaty tenor creates a character that could rival any great American folk hero and arms this character with an unflinching, yet nihilistic altruism. Elsewhere, delayed analogue synths, a rolling, deeply resonating bass line, and panned drum shots deliver a instrumental backdrop to a rich interplay of voices, only to later end in a wash of delayed electronic pulses and grating, metallic swells.

The band
The Pale Air Singers is a collaborative recording project between Calgary's The Cape May and Victoria's Run Chico Run. After threatening to work together for several years, the five members holed up in the studio over 2-3 weeks, and, in an intensive haze of creativity, hashed out an album. The two bands display a remarkable songwriting and improvisational rapport together, and this is hopefully a sign of future collaborations to come.