The Conscience Pilate Released New Single “Blue Shadows”

The Conscience Pilate play guitar-driven pop music that combines the energy of CBGB’s post-punk with the texture of 80’s alternative. The new single “Blue Shadows” marks the return of Toronto indie art rockers The Conscience Pilate and the start of their new collaboration that will see new singles arriving monthly for the remainder of 2023. After a 25 year hiatus, Edward Pond and Neil Leyton decided to reunite and immediately wrote new music over a bottle of Rioja. The Conscience Pilate started in Toronto in 1995 when songwriting duo Edward Pond and Neil Leyton finished university. As with most urgent rock projects, TCP self-destructed after just one album, but Pond and Leyton remained brothers. One night in November 2022 Neil said, “We have some unfinished business. Let’s make another record.” Two songs were written that night alone in Montreal. Reflecting on the new single “Blue Shadows” Leyton said, “ I come from a broken family, or rather, three. This is a song about the important things that can often go wrong in life. I’ve made some poor decisions along the way, and you have to reconcile yourself to yourself and hopefully also to the people concerned. Make amends. At the end of the day, life is short and we should recognize that no one is perfect – and then one day it is all over and you haven’t taken nearly all the right steps…”

“Blue Shadows” began with a painting Edward spotted over the toilet at his local coffee shop. The kind of painting you study for a moment as you use the facilities. “On the canvas there’s a little town with blue shadows on the snowy ground. I jotted that detail down along with its opposite — golden rays. I also have this recurring nightmare of the sun going black, leaving a dark disc in the sky against the stars. Neil dug both, so we packed them together into a lyric.” Getting the third in their series of singles proved to be more challenging than the first two. Pond recorded his bass tracks and vocals from a hospital bed in Toronto. As recording began, he was rushed by ambulance for an emergency appendectomy and spent two weeks in the hospital hooked up to a cluster of IV lines. Then he was discharged just in time to film a video for the song. Stacy Stray (Die Mannequin, The Valhounds) plays lead guitar on Blue Shadows. Stray was in the Conscience Pilate in 1997 and Leyton and Pond are thrilled to team up with him again on their new tracks. Stacy’s guitar will power several new songs in the coming months.

It takes a village, so while Pond and Leyton remain the core of the band, many of their musical cohorts from across the years are stepping up to play drums, guitars, record and pour synergy into this project. The band reunion happened because Pond had been storing 300 of Leyton’s vinyl records for the last 12 years, when Leyton moved to Lisbon. Finally Leyton came to Montreal (for the M for Montreal conference) and brought a set of three purple suitcases to stuff with vinyl to take back on the plane to Lisbon. They had piles of records on the floor of the hotel parking garage when Neil said, “Okay, we need to make our own record now.” They wrote Army of Devils that night. Starting in the summer of 2023 The Conscience Pilate will release a new single each month, beginning with “Army of Devils”, “Bloom” and now “Blue Shadows”.