The Reds, Pinks & Purples :: True Love Daydream

True Love Daydream arrives five months after Acknowledge Kindness, the tenth vinyl LP from The Reds, Pinks & Purples, and gathers six compositions born, for the most part, in the same stretch of work.

The kinship is close, and the EP also keeps some of what the album decided against. Across the twenty-eight minutes of this new release, Donaldson gives instrumental music more room than is usual for a writer whose recognisability by now rests, among other things, on his voice.

The three sections of “Shakespeare Garden”, set at the start, in the middle and at the close of the running order, take up enough of the record to change how the other compositions are heard. The title calls up a cultivated place, walked through more than once, where every passage lets you notice something that had slipped past in the one before.

The instrumentals are the record’s backbone, and the climate they set is the one the songs inherit: an overcast, late-afternoon melancholy, close to a certain Felt passed through Porl Thompson’s guitars. Setting aside his voice, one of the project’s clearest assets, for more than half the running time is the decision of a writer sure of his means.

This instrumental parenthesis also asks you to remember where he came from. Before The Reds, Pinks & Purples there were Mirza, Thuja, the Skygreen Leopards and the Jewelled Antler collective, founded with Loren Chasse. Part of that music handed to environment, improvisation and duration a weight the later indie-pop songs would gather into their melodies. “Shakespeare Garden” suggests that sensibility stayed within reach, stored somewhere through the years of home-made records and reverb-wet guitars.

Between these long intervals sit “Bad Poetry in Bed”, “Heaven of Love (Slow Version)” and “Every Shade of Blue”. The second has a history. Nearing the end of Acknowledge Kindness, Donaldson found the record already held too many ballads, and rearranged the song as something closer to pop. Recovering the first draft, he gives it back a different emotional duration. That a composition may have more than one definitive form is old in pop, and here it shows how far a decision of sequence can change what a song becomes.

“Every Shade of Blue” is older than the most recent sessions, and Donaldson considers it an early signal of the direction Acknowledge Kindness would later take. Steven R. Smith, who was there in the Thuja years, adds the atmospheres, and with him the song carries something of the instrumentals’ older ground into a pop setting.

The EP is at its strongest as a sequence, with the garden returning between songs and lengthening them by contrast. It is weaker as a stand-alone object. The slow “Heaven of Love” means most to someone who already knows the brisker version, and much of the record’s argument leans on an album it was cut away from. That dependence is also the reason to hear it: rarely does Donaldson leave his working decisions this visible.

True Love Daydream is out as a download and on cassette only, with no vinyl. The tape sold by Fire is grey, while the one on Bandcamp comes in what the label calls British Green.