(Dream Pop/Ethereal/Shoegaze) Pink Playground - Destination Ecstasy - 2011, MP3, 320 kbps

From Houston, TX comes Pink Playground, a new band that makes videos instead of playing live, and runs in the tradition of shoegaze and ethereal sounds right back to the earliest Jesus and Mary Chain demos. Guitars, synths, otherworldly vocals and drum machines collude to the proto-noise pop moment of the mid ’80s, and charges forth as if the band’s members were born to play in that vein. Ear-splitting volume and spun sugar melodies fill the space with pink pollen blizard dynamics so thick and hazy you might need a dust mask to power through them, songs so sweet that they sting, manners inverted into a new form of aggression.

"Houston, TX's Pink Playground have hatched one of this years finest shoegaze tributes with their debut album, 'Destination Ecstasy'. In the finest tradition of MBV or Jesus & Mary Chain it comprises eight cathartic noise pop stuns, hewn from amp-busting and jangling guitars, brittle drum machines and swooning, glossolalic vocals haunted by wraith-like synth dissonance, sometimes feeling so perfect they're about to implode in a shower of excoriating diamond dust. It's out-and-out pop music, of the almost-painfully beautiful kind, manicured distortion amping a sense of socio-cultural isolation, cocooning the neurotic bedroom listener in a (Kevin) shield(s) of narcissistic reverb reflections. Utterly lush stuff, well recommended." - Boomkat

Tara Tyson & James Wing