Under-rated Epic Mancunian band Puressence release their new single, ‘When Your Eyes Close’, this June an edited version of the track found on their brand new album ‘Solid State Revival.’ They support the release with something of a North West homecoming on Saturday 8th October 2011 at Liverpool Guild of Students, Stanley Theatre.
A soaring, emotion-soaked beauty, ‘When Your Eyes Close’ features the guest vocals of luminous American folk-rock legend Judy Collins alongside those of the band’s frontman James Mudriczki. Collins’ pure vocal dovetails beautifully with that Mudriczki, the owner of an extraordinary and distinctive vibrato bolted to raw power and a fantastic range.
Collins, a convert to the Manchester-based band since she heard their 2007 album ‘Don’t Forget To Remember’, says Puressence, “swept me off my feet when I first heard them. They’re a very moving experience, very, very special indeed, and they have such amazing songs. And where did James learn to sing like that? His voice is an instrument of such clarity and purity and flexibility, it just does you in.”
Puressence have always been about the emotion since they formed in the early nineties after schoolmates Mudriczki and Tony Szuminski (drums) first met Kevin Matthews (bass) and founding guitarist Neil MacDonald on the bus to The Stone Roses’ legendary Spike Island show in 1989. Puressence married the presence and attitude of the Roses to a haunting and molten guitar rock that last hit the heights during the era of Joy Division and Echo & The Bunnymen. After two singles on Manchester’s 2 Damn Loud label in 1992 and one for Rough Trade’s singles club, Island Records won the race to sign them. 1996’s self-titled debut album and 1998’s Only Forever followed, with ‘This Feeling’ breaking the UK Top 40 single chart that year. “All I Want” was another Top 40 hit, as was ‘Walking Dead’ from 2002’s beats-laced Planet Helpless album.
All these tracks were included on their 2009 compilation ‘Sharpen Up The Knives’, which drew on the band’s Island Records years between 1996 and 2002. Plus there was Mudriczki’s spine-shivering solo version of ‘Che’, originally recorded for 2008’s Judy Collins tribute album Born To The Breed, also featuring the likes of Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Chrissie Hynde and Dolly Parton, though Collins thinks ‘Che’, “was the most interesting thing on the whole album. So different and wonderfully fresh.”
On stage, James’ thousand yard stare is legendary among fans (though he always breaks into a broad smile between songs): “it is a really draining experience for me, to get out what I need to for the tunes,” he says. “I can’t just casually let the words drip from my mouth; I have to really feel it. The intensity comes from believing it, and letting it out. It’s like when you hear Scott Walker and Ian Curtis – no way were they faking what they were singing about.”
That intensity can be traced to growing up in North Manchester, “one of most deprived parts of the country. I can only draw on my life experiences, to those people close to me, and channel that in the music. I’m singing about love, deceit, being let down, good times, bad times. Stuff people in Victorian times wrote about, that people will be writing about in five hundred years. But it proves that good can come from the bad.”
Not forgetting the band’s first independently released album in ‘Don’t Forget To Remember’ (with new guitarist Lowell Killen in place), ‘Sharpen Up The Knives’ represented the band’s real big new beginning, as it included two new tracks ‘Raise Me To The Ground’ and ‘Our Number’s Oracle’. Both signalled a return to Puressence, knives sharpened, back to their brilliant and most emotionally charged best. Judy Collins likes the album so much, she sings on a second track too, the album’s smouldering seven-minute opener “Swathes Of Sea Made Stone”.
Especially loved in their Manchester homeland and also Southern Europe (they play to tens of thousands in Greece), Puressence are, as July Collins says, very, very special. Starting with “When Your Eyes Close’, let Puressence sweep you off your feet too.
