This long as-all-hell 90’s alt. revival is showing no sign of coming to an end, or even slowing down. Apparently, if you’re a West Coast indie band without a copy of Psychocandy you aren’t even allowed to exist in 2011. Luckily for us, the music that’s come out of this has been mostly solid to good; turns out you can do quite a bit with some guitar fuzz, a breathy vocalist and some dum, dah dum tish drums.
Pure X (formerly Pure Ecstasy), following some great early buzz, have finally delivered their debut LP, and it’s a slightly different proposition. It’s not a record to bounce to, and it doesn’t exactly sound like young love either. It kind of sounds like summer, but it’s definitely not picnic music. It would, however, be the perfect soundtrack to a morning cigarette on a hotel balcony, especially if you didn’t wake up alone.
As a statement of intent, opening track ‘Heavy Air’ is a masterstroke, a glacially paced instrumental that doesn’t so much begin as emerge from the haze. These guys know how gripping a bass-led melody can be and ‘Heavy Air’ has a great one, leaving the guitars free to move around the space. It sets up the album’s surprising but entirely welcome touchstone as Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, but more concise, and broadcast from the surface of Mars.
But let’s get back to those guitars; they are, after all, Pleasure’s biggest pull. Nate Grace’s work here is extremely impressive, especially as he entirely shuns any kind of blatant virtuoso trash. Instead, we get ripples of chiming beauty, shimmering, eastern-tinged textures and waves of thick feedback. Grace knows how to use a good noise when he finds it, and Pleasure is peppered with beautifully measured moments of pure ear candy. Around two minutes in to ‘Heavy Air’ he hits an absolutely sweet chord and just lets it hang there for over a minute; he’s happy to let his effects pedal sing, and the results are simultaneously gripping and meditative.
But a nice guitar sound alone does not a great album make. Fortunately Pure X deliver here too, though a touch more derivatively, mining the fashionable 50’s and 60’s love ballad songbook for inspiration. Though lacking the immediacy of the songwriting of, say, Girls, these songs are still laden with enough hooks and woo’s to keep your interest up, and Grace has casually mastered the art of the slow, languid verse. Pure X could doubtless pull off a great cover of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’.
It’s hardly the most original album you’ll hear this year, and it’s not really the kind of thing people build cults around either. But it is a solid, nicely put together set of likeable songs from some talented guys who know their stuff, who have successfully developed a signature sound and made it work. You could put far, far worse in your ears the next time you’re lying stoned on a beach.
22/8/2011
[Rating:4]
http://pure-x.info/ (Scroll down for full album stream)
