The Blue Nile - Albums Collection 1984-1996 (3CD)

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The Blue Nile - Albums Collection 1984-1996 (3CD)

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The Scottish folk-ambient band the Blue Nile has enjoyed a mystique contrived by its inaccessibility and the infrequency of its recordings, but it has also made a series of critically acclaimed discs. The group was formed by three Glasgow natives who had graduated from university there: singer/songwriter/guitarist Paul Buchanan, bassist Robert Bell, and keyboardist Paul Joseph Moore. (Engineer Callum Malcolm and drummer Nigel Thomas have worked with the trio consistently, to the point of being considered secondary bandmembers.) (The Blue Nile is the title of Alan Moorehead's 1962 sequel to The White Nile, the two books making up a history of the Nile River.) They recorded their own single, "I Love This Life," which was distributed by Robert Stigwood's RSO Records just before the company closed its doors. They were then signed by Linn Products, which released their debut album, A Walk Across the Rooftops, in 1984. (A&M handled it in the U.S.) Since the company was small and the band did not tour, the album took some time to find its audience, though it briefly reached the U.K. charts and led to high expectations for a second album. This came in 1989 with Hats, which reached the British Top 20, throwing off three chart singles, "The Downtown Lights," "Headlights on the Parade," and "Saturday Night." The album also made the lower reaches of the American charts as the Blue Nile embarked on its first tour, a 30-date journey taking place in the British Isles and the U.S. In the ensuing years, the band members switched record labels, signing to Warner Bros., and contributed to recordings by Robbie Robertson and Julian Lennon. They finally emerged with their third album, Peace at Last, in June 1996. Another critically acclaimed release, it placed in the U.K. Top 20, but failed to chart in the U.S.

Biography by William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

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The Blue Nile - Albums Collection 1984-1996 (3CD)

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The Blue Nile - Albums Collection 1984-1996 (3CD)

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The Blue Nile - Albums Collection 1984-1996 (3CD)

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The Blue Nile's debut album has a rather fascinating genesis. Scotland's Linn Electronics wanted a demo track to demonstrate the fidelity and versatility of their new recording console and tapped a struggling local trio, The Blue Nile, to provide it. Their effort was a deliberately disjunctive song called "A Walk Across the Rooftops." To demonstrate the recording equipment's dynamic range and clarity, the song was arranged most peculiarly, with vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, and full string and horn sections all appearing, but never at the same time. Linn liked the song so much that they formed a record label and bankrolled the recording of this full album. The seven lengthy tracks on A Walk Across the Rooftops all follow the model of the opener, with Paul Buchanan's rich voice at the center of near-symphonic arrangements that manage to sound lush and incredibly austere at the same time. The tempos are deadly slow, with the most upbeat track, "Tinseltown in the Rain," barely rising above a graceful saunter, and the inventive arrangements make extensive use of empty space. This was a popular album for demonstrating the lack of hiss and background noise in the then-new compact disc medium, but A Walk Across the Rooftops works even better as a piece of music than as a stereo demonstration record.

Review by Stewart Mason, Allmusic.com

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The Blue Nile - Albums Collection 1984-1996 (3CD)

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Five long years in the making, the Blue Nile's stellar Hats was well worth the wait; sweeping and majestic, it's a triumph of personal vision over the cold, remote calculations of technology. While created almost solely without benefit of live instruments, it is nevertheless an immensely warm and human album; Paul Buchanan's plaintive vocals and poignant songs are uncommonly moving, and his deployment of lush synth washes and electronic percussion is never gratuitous, each song instead crafted with painterly precision. Impressionistic and shimmering, tracks like "The Downtown Lights" and "From a Late Night Train" are perfectly evocative of their titles: Rich in romantic atmosphere and detail, they conjure a nocturnal fantasy world lit by neon and shrouded in fog, leaving Hats an intensely cinematic experience as well as a masterpiece of musical obsession.

Review by Jason Ankeny, Allmusic.com

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The Blue Nile - Albums Collection 1984-1996 (3CD)

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The members of the Blue Nile seem to have taken seriously all those articles and reviews about what audiophiles and technicians they are, and this time around they've spent a half-dozen years concocting an album that sounds like they made at least some of it in their living rooms rather than their space-age studio. They achieve the appearance of simplicity and humanity by foregrounding either an acoustic guitar or piano on most tracks, by restraining other instrumentation, by making their synthesizers sound like strings most of the time, and by using real strings on occasion. All of which makes for appropriate settings for Paul Buchanan's songs of domestic contentment. "Happiness," "Sentimental Man," "Holy Love": the titles tell the story, though they don't reveal the underlying fear that it will all go bust. ("Now that I've found peace at last," Buchanan sings to open up the album, "Tell me, Jesus, will it last?") Nor do they explain why a guy who keeps insisting that he's happy sounds so mournful. Buchanan belongs to the Bono/Peter Gabriel school of throaty emotiveness, in which sudden, arbitrary ascensions toward the falsetto signal fits of otherwise unacknowledged passion (or maybe just a sneeze coming on). In Buchanan, the singing style and the loose structure of the songs make his protestations of tranquility unconvincing. That may be what he intends, especially since they lend an implied depth to what is the Blue Nile's lightest effort yet.

Review by William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com