Gilles Snowcat’s criminal record?
Party In Lyceum’s Toilets, the massive double CD from Awaken released in 2001, is a criminal record in its own special way: it follows you all through your life and career, everywhere you go. Whatever you do, you’ll be constantly reminded of that very past deed, compared to it and most surprisingly: blamed of the fact that you don’t do it anymore. Gloomy crimes bring unexpected prestige.
Shit into gold
Art is very forgiving field: your technical flaws turn into strengths with the magic wand of time. Shit becomes gold. What was hated is worshiped like a god coming on Earth. Hence the cult status earned with little efforts by uncountable records and artists that were generating nothing but contempt at the time of activity.
The sessions were intense but quite far from the excitement of later Awaken / Snowcat albums. PiLT (as it is often nicknamed) comes from a delicate mix of gloom, coldness, industrial suburbs landscaped, quiet desperation and the paradox of building a wall around oneself yet wanting nothing else than shattering it to dust.
This throbbing mal-de-vivre pours from every note of the 140 minutes that overfill the quadruple album (2CD worthing 4 vinyl albums), and that’s precisely why it still appeals to lost teenagers, carrying that indescribable spleen from classroom to the usual stinky toilets of their high-school.
Jaded
The sessions that resulted in PiLT have kept three pieces that couldn’t make it on the album, for a very practical and boring matter of timing.
The first one, “Dream Shapes On A Night Movie“, fell out of place once last-minute songs were suddenly completed.
Then “Still Today / I’m Nine“, that was planned to be the interlude of side 4, the 1988 songs freshly re-recorded for the occasion. This being said, that side 4 shows to what extent the 1988 songs, full of lust, power and romanticism, weren’t matching the PiLT jaded mood.
Talking about “Electric Time“, two versions were recorded and without surprise, it’s the most Awaken-ish one that was kept for the CD. This very one isn’t better or worse, it’s simply… different. A taste of the 80’s in a world where shine was absent from the process.
Not that PiLT was a lifeless album, far from it. It’s just that many things happened for the wrong reasons, like walking on thin ice just to realise when it breaks you only find a devouring quicksand sucking you as strongly as you try to escape.
Teenagers getting old
PiLT was the result of teenagers getting old, which is the worse that can happen to them. Once you open your eyes, either you die, or you get back to lust, astonishment and hunger to live. Luckily, the releases that came the next 15 years from then were back to be made of that sexy, lubricious and neon-lit never-get-old adventurous stuff.
Listen and get your own copy of the PiLT Sessions outtakes here.
The Many Whiskers Of The Snowcat 