Day 165: Pink Turns Blue – If Two Worlds Kiss
I’m in the most neutral mood possible today, so music-wise it was dealer’s choice. I could go for absolutely anything, so I decided to go for a bit of darkwave – I think it’s a genre where I could really find something I love with a little bit of digging. I’m going through some of the pioneers in the genre, so today’s album is Pink Turns Blue’s 1987 debut If Two Worlds Kiss.
Album cover courtesy of Fun Factory!
Pink Turns Blue were formed in Cologne in 1985 by singer/guitarist Thomas Elbern and bassist, vocalist and keyboard player Mic Jogwer. Elbern had put an ad in a local newspaper saying that he wants to form a band, and Jogwer answered. They took their name from the title of a Hüsker Dü song, “Pink Turns to Blue,” which in itself is a band who went to the Häagen-Dazs school of naming things, as they took the Danish term for “Do you remember?” and added a few umlauts to sound more worldly and mysterious.
If Two Worlds Kiss was the bands first release, and they immediately found a bit of success, both abroad and in Germany. After the release of the album, they also toured with a Slovenian political dissident band called Laibach and befriended their sound guy, who invited them to Ljubljana to record their second album. They paid for it by smuggling Western recording equipment across the border.
There’s parts of the album that sound a little bit undercooked, but mostly it’s a strong debut, maybe veering more into downtrodden post punk rather than full-fledged goth rock. I find the writing to be the most interesting parts of it: the oftentimes slightly clunky and formal-sounding English somehow adds to the writing and the atmosphere.
The songs are dramatic, like little fragments of gothic poetry that’s built on individual sentences that convey a mood more than actual substance, but it still oddly works. The first verse of the opener “I Coldly Stare Out” is a perfect example of the style of writing:
Comes a time, comes a shadow
Comes a devil, calls your name
Can't you hear his echoing paces
Cold fingers point on you
Icy sounds cry into the night
Just a puppet in their play
A lonesome king calls his lonely crowd
Calls you home into decay
I liked “Walking On Both Sides” and “That Was You” more than the rest of the album, but all of it was enjoyable. It’s a good foray into the history of darkwave, but probably not something I’ll listen to too much in the future. If Two Worlds Kiss is still a solid and reasonable 7/10.