Cloth – Pink Silence: Review

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The results of Cloth’s new album put what’s come before firmly in the rearview mirror.

One of the reasons musicians can get into relationship difficulties is that it’s a profession where, more than many others, personal things can overlap with the professional.

Imagine then being in a band with your sibling. And then imagine the only other member being your twin.

This is how it is for Cloth, the Glasgow based duo of Rachael and Paul Swinton who signed to Mogwai’s Rock Action label and of whom Pink Silence is their third album, the follow up to 2023’s sophomore effort Secret Measure.

Their work to-date has been largely for the introvert, with Rachael’s vocals gentle and undersold whilst her brother’s lyricism and guitar work has steered them on a course through the margins of backroom guitar pop.

Produced on this occasion by Ali Chant (Yard Act, Perfume Genius, PJ Harvey), the pair have now decided – in their own way – to go for broke.

Paul explains: “It was a conscious decision to go bigger, more muscular and less subtle, there was a willingness to push ourselves as far as we could go in terms of how cinematic we could make things.”

Muscle might not necessarily be a term that sprung to mind when thinking about them in the past, and Pink Silence’s title is mired in the sense of ambiguity which previously characterized them.

Paul again: “It can mean one of two things; something which feels blissfully serene, or something charged with a real sense of foreboding. I loved the idea that something so natural, beautiful and all-pervasive could have such an intense duality to it.”

Any thoughts of flimsiness though were further brushed to one side by Cloth bringing in Owen Pallett, Adrian Utley of Portishead and Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, each who brought a layer of invention to the duo’s grand scheming. The results put what’s come before firmly in the rearview mirror.

Much of the backdrop is themed around the end of a relationship and breaking the cycle of its toxicity. The titular opener’s scratchy, featherlike abstractions flit through lyrics about how moments can be magnified by externalities, ideas and places as their significance bleeds into heightened emotions.

Cloth’s atmospherics have in the past been compared to The xx, but Polaroid – augmented by a string arrangement from Pallett – has an urgency which takes them from consciously within themselves, as much as the song itself is about the disappearance of someone cherished into memories.

It takes some effort to remember these confessionals take place in the real world life of a brother and sister, which makes I Don’t Think So’s overwhelming feelings of regret drain away in the face of a sweetly delivered chorus all the deeper.

This same acute feeling of one emoting through another persists in Golden, a tumbling drum and angular guitar peeking through the haze, whilst growing from what were initially a few hung together phrases, on Stones the orchestration helps transform what would otherwise have been a ruminative ballad into something greatly more than the sum of the parts.

Putting trust one way or another in something else was a part of both the process and the outcome. On It’s A Lot, Chant provided inspiration by introducing Cloth to a vintage drum machine whilst they later ganged and over riffed on it, whilst Pallet’s final act is to provide closer Write It Down with a glumly cinematic horizon.

Maybe being so close to a person’s vulnerability allows the Swintons to both simultaneously connect and detach from it.

Either way Pink Silence is Cloth’s best album so far, one that proves big ideas can be both great and big but don’t necessarily need to sound that way.

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