We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

'Leased Regret' The Violets - (25th Anniversary Remastered Edition)

by The Violets Australia

supported by
jeanguillier
jeanguillier thumbnail
neilskepper
neilskepper thumbnail
/
1.
Mary Who 04:08
buy track
2.
One-eyed man 04:15
buy track
3.
Somewhere 04:40
buy track
4.
December's daughter 04:30
buy track
5.
Ain't love grand 04:10
buy track
6.
Pretty hate machine 03:41
buy track
7.
Shattered 04:45
buy track
8.
Shadows 05:07
buy track
9.
Hideous 04:22
buy track
10.
A Mare' 05:06
buy track

about

The Violets
Leased Regret
25th Anniversary Remaster

November 2020


Although not everyone is familiar with what philosopher Hannah Arendt famously called ‘the banality of evil’, none of us can avoid the banality of time. Thus, beyond the mawkish and distorting sentiment of nostalgia, an invitation to contribute liner notes for the remastered version of a record I first wrote a similar blurb for twenty-five years ago is a reminder of such. I look at the original cover art – the adult couple, the two kids – and I wonder where the intervening quarter century has landed them. It reminds me that an album, like all our artefacts, are moments frozen.

Called upon to ponder these spruced-up songs I am, perhaps predictably, riven. Back then, 1995, like The Violets themselves, I was still in my twenties. It was a different world. Email accounts were exotic and cool. Our phones were dumb. We counted our friends on our fingers and we bought music on CD and vinyl. Listening to Leased Regret whole, in order, in the pandemic affected whirl of 2020, illustrates the space between. As though its fixed point serves to make clear the inevitability of motion.

Yet, art is never truly still. Why? Because the act of beholding is dynamic. When I first wrote about this record for an Adelaide based indie mag it lived on a personal playlist including The Bends, Dummy, Dog Man Star and Grace. To me, it sat well with its more famous contemporaries and most certainly outshone anything else coming out of our hometown. Moreover, it was an honour to be so closely connected to its creators and to witness at least some of the internal workings of its making. For this reason, Leased Regret is indelible. However, it is far from static. Listening now, in my mid-fifties, its drama and energy are at once distant and immediate. Hindsight – if that’s what you want to call it – has indeed altered these ten tracks.

The experience is more than merely poignant. More than misty-eyed Gold FM schmaltz or ossified retrospective. If you’ll pardon the pun, Leased Regret remains a kind of 20/20 vision. True, it is guitar-driven ‘pop’ and it speaks to a certain moment when indie rock went overground, but as a psycho-emotional document it crackles with determined resistance. Its angst is still raw, yet now nuanced. There is perspective. Stoicism. Its heartaches and doubts and various furies are transcribed as beauty. It sees, in imperfection, the possibility of splendor. Of transformation.

Cue, twenty-five years. The child has grown. The parent has passed. The dust has gathered and been swept up again. The four Violets have spent longer apart than together. Now, remastered, their debut album sparkles, given new context. Same…but different. Like us.

The ordinary passing of days can sometimes reveal the extraordinary. Hang a picture on a hook and take note as the way you see it changes. Pick an old record off a shelf and listen to it for the first time. Nothing is fixed. Even frozen moments have a way of moving you. So it is, twenty-five years after the fact, that we give thanks for the banality of change.


Paul Ransom
August 2020
Melbourne, Australia.

credits

released November 1, 2020

Recorded & engineered by Mick Wordley & Stuart MacQueen @ Mixmasters Studios,
between 1992 & 1994. Remastered by Brett Sody & Matt Cahill @ Sodypop Studio 2020.

© Paper Rock Scissors Records 2020

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

The Violets Australia image

The Violets Australia Australia

From the day they first formed in Adelaide, Australia back in 1990, The Violets were an enigma. Created from a fusion of shimmering guitar lines, sonic abstraction and an almost cinematic vision, they smashed together light and dark, and made beautiful agony dance cheek-to-cheek with pretty mystery. It was pop, it was prog, it was flat out indie rock – but it was never quite like anything else. ... more

contact / help

Contact The Violets Australia

Streaming and
Download help

Shipping and returns

Report this album or account

If you like The Violets Australia, you may also like:

Bandcamp Daily  your guide to the world of Bandcamp

On Bandcamp Radio

Featuring Riley Pinkerton (aka The Rat Queen) from the theatrical NYC rockers, Castle Rat.
listen now