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Lilac Time - Astronauts - Super Deluxe Triple Album (Uk)

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Format: CD
Rel. Date: 12/20/2024
UPC: 198588235645

Astronauts - Super Deluxe Triple Album (Uk)
Artist: Lilac Time
Format: CD
New: Not in stock
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Three CD edition. Over three years in the making, Needle Mythology Records is delighted to announce a super deluxe, expanded remastered reissue of The Lilac Time's 1991 masterpiece, Astronauts. Includes an extensive 11,000 word oral history of Astronauts and liner notes by Needle Mythology co-founder and longtime Stephen Duffy fan, Pete Paphides. Contains a 2024 remaster, a collection of works in progress entitled 'Softened By Rain The Making Of Astronauts' and a live compilation 'Any Road Up The Lilac Time Live 1990/91'. The Lilac Time's fourth album was released at a moment when the left-field music zeitgeist was shaped by the nascent shoegaze, baggy and grunge movements. Whilst Astronauts conformed to none of those trends, neither was it the record Stephen had in his head when he finally finished working on it. We'll never know how that record would have sounded, but it's hard to imagine a better version of the album he did end up making. The songwriter who brought 'A Taste of Honey' and 'Hats Off, Here Comes The Girl' into the world envisaged the sort of choruses that would jump from the single speaker of your favourite transistor and lodge themselves into the collective memory bank. But while he really was writing some of his most beautiful melodies, Astronauts is a family of songs that demands to be kept together in the sun-dazed cloud of inspiration that created it. It constitutes a partial retreat from the outward-facing utopianism of it's predecessors, choosing instead to dwell on the journey taken to get to this point. That this is an audibly different band to the pastoral expeditionaries of the group's previous releases is almost entirely down to the departure of Nick Duffy and the arrival of Sagat Guirey. Suddenly, accordions, banjos and mandolins are out; jazz guitar is in. Sagat's filigree work on the outro of 'A Taste for Honey' acts as a sublime parting shot to a lyric which acts as a wiser, wistful companion piece to Stephen's 1985 solo hit 'Kiss Me', something tantamount to the camera retreating to reveal the years elapsed between the time depicted and the present day. The distance between the carefree youth of pop stardom and the first intimations of mortality can be m
        
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