Earlier this year The Pastels finally returned with a long-awaited new record, Slow Summits. ‘Kicking Leaves’, one of the key tracks, slaloms fantastically in and out of focus, Katrina Mitchell’s vocal gliding along Craig Armstrong’s majestic string arrangement. The video was shot by Blair Young at The Forest Of Black.

“’Kicking Leaves’ is sunblind chill in Fall, or maybe the cool warmth of late Spring, depending on which hemisphere you’re standing in right now.  If it’s Autumn where you are, every breath trails white as quiet colours collide in the beam of your vision.  This moment of transformation is one The Pastels have always captured well, when you’re see-sawing between states, just before diving in with typical boldness and bravura (the strings skirling around the song’s coda capture that giddy moment of uncertainty perfectly).

“The Forest Of Black respond with a beautiful film of many parts: double-exposures that gently psychedelicise Glasgow landscapes; sudden bursts of saturated energy like the ‘closed-eye vision’ celebrated by Stan Brakhage, “the shapes and colours we see when our eyes are closed,” as Fred Camper explains. But the kinetic drive of the treatments also reminds me of other pioneers of experimental film form, like Margaret Tait, Marie Menken, Rose Lowder and Cecile Fontaine, whose beautiful filmic visions present new ways of seeing, tender buttons of exploration and inspiration, channelled by cinematic free radicals.” – Jon Dale, Melbourne, November 2013

The Pastels will be playing a set at Mono in Glasgow on December 7^th.

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