| Winter Pageant | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | the Softies |
| Border: | yes |
| Released: | 1997 |
| Genre: | Indie rock |
| Label: | K Records[1] |
| Prev Title: | The Softies |
| Prev Year: | 1996 |
| Next Title: | Holiday in Rhode Island |
| Next Year: | 2000 |
Winter Pageant is an album by the American indie rock musical duo the Softies, released in 1997.[2] [3] The sound was occasionally dismissed as "crush-core".[4] The duo supported the album with a North American tour.[5]
The album was recorded without a rhythm section, with one or two guitars as accompaniment.[6] The majority of the songs deal with troubled relationships and broken friendships.[7]
Entertainment Weekly wrote that "Jen Sbragia and Rose Melberg ... strum and twang guitars while delicately harmonizing, their lovely vocals masking bitter lyrics about broken relationships."[8] CMJ New Music Monthly thought that Melberg and Sbragia's voices "are complementary, but there's a cool space between them: a graceful austerity that creates some of the record's most sublime moments."[9] The Oregonian decided that "the Softies are saved from being mired between the twin evils of cutesy candy-coating and abject despair by a queer note of hope found in even their saddest stories."[10]
Spin called the album "music for indoor introverts—solitary souls who still write letters." The Washington Post opined that it "combines '50s lounge music melodies with the '60s pop-rock harmonies of Softie Rose Melberg's previous band, the ebullient Tiger Trap."[11] The Lincoln Journal Star deemed Winter Pageant "deeply honest confessions of lost love, broken promises and lives adrift, set in quiet songs that are near lullabies, but have a lasting power."[12]
AllMusic wrote that "despite the melancholy tone, there is something hopeful in the Softies' resignation, a faith in perfect moments that is as strong as the knowledge of love's frailty."