Scottish indie-pop icons The Pastels started their Geographic label essentially for the purpose of introducing Maher Shalal Hash Baz's music to the non-Japanese world-at-large. Everything that's come since has sort of fallen in behind Tori Kudo's manic ad-hoc love-in mess-music ensemble. If Geographic has an aesthetic imprint, it's a favoring of ramshackle, sentimental, homegrown, handmade songs assembled in "collage" fashion. This is often the product of a group in which assembled ranks surround a compositional figurehead, like Kudo in Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Sushil K. Dade in Future Pilot AKA, Tom Crossley in International Airport, or Bill Wells with his Trio or Octet. It's "humanism," in a sense, the musical result of such a nefarious phrase sounding rather like melancholy, oft-kilter pop-music. You Don't Need Darkness to Do What You Think Is Right, a 17-song compile subtitled "New Geographic Music," was initially commissioned as an overview/introduction to the label by Cornelius's wonderful Trattoria Sound label in Japan. But, rather than just pick from their discography, the Pastels folk instead took to the front foot and used the licensing fee to fund new recordings by the constituents of their extended Geographic family. The compilation commences with The Pastels themselves covering Sly Stone in the most knit-jumper-clad fashion, seemingly influenced by the rainy-day style they've helped cultivate on their label. Familiar friends International Airport, the Bill Wells Octet, Future Pilot AKA, Appendix Out, Telstar Ponies, and the Org-axis of Maher Shalal Hash Baz and acid-folk evangelists Nagisa Ni Te all turn up on the compile. But the quality of this record is that the smaller artists and known names brought on board fit in with the aesthetic perfectly. Kevin Shields makes a graceful turn on closing, taking pieces from The Pastels' intro and stringing them out amidst wrung-out guitar and crackling static. Linda Reid invites her brothers William and Jim along on her frail and breathy soft-pop number "Farewell, Farewell," sounding much more like the Gentle Waves than the Mary Chain. And Monika sista Barbara Morgenstern fronts with another cold-and-crackly exercise in electro-distress/churning-organ/whispery-singing, responding to the label's request to "have a 'pop moment'" with quite a chipper tune, "Kleiner Ausschnitt." As far as the unknowns go, Plinth, Directorsound, and Pedro all make a case to have an eye kept on them in the future, favoring gentle, pastoral passages of hazy instrumentalism in which the men-as-islands behind the compositions forsake the cheap thrills of clicking their mouse and smacking their glitch up to carefully construct wobbling songs. Directorsound's Nick Palmer evokes heavy nostalgia with an interlude that sounds like it was rescued from some dusty 78.
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