Purity Ring - bodyache

The biggest difference to Another Eternity, the second Purity Ring record, from the first is that this time round Megan and Corin worked in the same room rather than by correspondence. Sonically however, little seems to have changed – there’s no ditching of electronics for guitars for example. Dropping  their trademark sound would have seemed odd at this stage in the band’s career though, a bit like splitting up with a perfectly great boyfriend or girlfriend just because you fancied a change.

And new song bodyache (yes, no capital letter) is the musical equivalent of that very good boyfriend or girlfriend – managing to combine the bands alt.pop alien cute oddness with a sound that nearly approaches the area of widescreen radio pop banger. Stream that below and listen to an advance stream of the album via NPR here.

Purity Ring - bodyache (Video)

Purity Ring - Begin Again

Whilst there doesn’t appear to be any radical change in direction in their musical style, Begin Again, the second track from Purity Ring’s new album Another Eternity (released in March via 4AD) bodes well for a quality follow up. Even BBC Radio 1 have recently / finally got on board with the duo, B-playlisting previous tune Push Pull. 

Mountainous slow spacey rave synths feature prominently on this one, bringing a sense of impending doom or joy depending on your mood. Then there's Megan’s pretty nursery rhyme style of vocal intonation that has a strange sense of creepiness as well as beauty. “You be the moon, I’ll be the earth, and when we burst, start over oh darling, begin again,” she sings as we head towards the explosion.

Apparently Purity Ring’s debut Shrines was pieced together while the two lived separately in Halifax and Montreal, whilst for Another Eternity marks the first time Purity Room was able to record while in the same room. Can you tell the difference? Probably not, but it’s something extra to add onto the press release isn’t it?

Purity Ring - Begin Again

Purity Ring - Push Pull

The start of 2015 is looking like it could be a pretty good one in the UK for those who like pop music that has a little bit more edge than your average pop by numbers chart topper who spends all of their time 'in da club' and 'not giving a shit'. Charli XCX’s Sucker, and Indiana’s No Romeo are promised and now there’s news of a second Purity Ring album with the appearance of Push Pull, a delightfully crisp sounding electronic pop song that finds Megan singing of creeping up and not letting go, a bit like what this song does to inside the head.

Roll on 2015. We can’t wait.

Purity Ring - Push Pull

Purity Ring - Fineshrine

Here’s an admission. We hardly ever read or visit Pitchfork. If that makes you think that we’re not serious about our music, well that’s fine. If we all get too worthy it will become a chore rather than a pleasure and then we’re all done for. However, on one of our rare visits to the revered site we did discover Purity Ring.

The Canadian duo has been getting a lot of attention from the blogosphere with each single release they put out. But blog attention doesn’t always equate to real life popularity. The latest buzz band may be riding the hype-highway to hell with internet adoration and Pitchfork 9.8’s out of 10 but when it comes to live shows they can still end up playing to one man and his dog in a stinking boozer in Cardiff on a damp Monday night. However, Purity Ring do seem to be managing to transfer some of the world wide web fervour to bums on seats; a recent packed sold-out gig at Madame Jo-Jo’s in London is some evidence of that. We need to be mindful though that the venue capacity is only 200 people. If they had been playing in Dundee or the above mentioned Cardiff how many tickets would they have sold there? In a random survey of ten people in a pub in our home city of Portsmouth only one of them had heard of Purity Ring (the band) and only because he read about them on this blog. Breaking More Waves - more influential than Pitchfork in a certain pub in Portsmouth perhaps? 

Fineshrine is the latest teaser from the group prior to the release of their album Shrines. Within 8 hours of the song being released 25 Hype Machine listed blogs (mainly American) had posted the track and no doubt countless others have done so as well. Probably by the time you read this (written the night before it’s posted, because at Breaking More Waves we’ve never been bothered or have the available free time to be ‘the first to post’ and prefer to provide a small amount of regular daily content which we have to schedule to fit in with our busy non-internet life) plenty of other blogs will have jumped on board. There’s a simple reason for this; because Purity Ring are infectiously good. Cute-glitchy r ‘n’ b influenced electronica with sweet melodies and hooks as displayed by this latest offering. Enjoy the sounds of Fineshrine. It’s worth the buzz. 2012 looks like it could be their year.

Purity Ring - Fineshrine 

Purity Ring - Obedear

We’re thinking of running an internet TV show for bloggers. It will be called ‘The Cool Factor’. Bloggers will audition by showing how quickly they can copy, paste and embed the latest buzz track onto their blogs. The fastest ten will then take part in the live shows where they’ll have to demonstrate their ability to check their emails, Soundcloud, You Tube, RSS and twitter feeds in search of the buzz at super-human speed with the audience clicking on little red hearts (that look a lot like Hype Machine love hearts) to vote for their favourite blogger.

If the only blog you ever look at is Breaking More Waves then this will mean nothing to you, but if you regularly scour the internet for the best in new music then you’ll probably have come across this phenomenon, seeing certain songs becoming rapidly ubiquitous on blogs over the course of a few hours. Such is the fate of the new Purity Ring track, Obedear. It's found bloggers falling over themselves to get the song up on the web - go search for it on Google or Hype Machine and you'll see what we mean. 

Is this form of 'buzz blogging' a good thing or a bad thing ? Certainly most new artists value the exposure a huge number of blogs posting their song can give - artists after all want their music to be heard, otherwise why release it at all?

In the short term this spike wave of listeners on the internet can be invaluable, but in the longer term there needs to be something more from the artist than just a couple of songs that the buzz brigade get excited about.  We've noticed that sometimes it's better for an artist to be just be picked up by one or two blogs and slowly as they release more tracks their online presence and exposure  grows organically. We've seen evidence of this with at least two acts that we've been writing about over the last year, initially we were acting as a blogging one-man fan-machine, but slowly but surely other blogs that we would associate as our blog-buddies, with overlaps in taste, style or attitude are beginning to pick up on them and their exposure and fan base is growing. There's no buzz, just good music.

So this is for those who take a more leisurely and / or single-read approach to music blogs. If you already read lots of them what follows you'll probably already know. We're joining the buzz, because there's also good music here.

With an album due in summer 2012 through 4AD, Megan James and Corin Roddick who are Purity Ring produce this taster from it, full of choppy plink-plonk electronics, pitch shifted female vocals and menacing undertones. That description probably doesn’t sound that different to the much of the weighty volume of electronic music that gets pushed out onto the internet by laptop bedroom producers every day. What sets Purity Ring apart in the melee for blog coverage is a leftfield pop sensibility that also carries a slightly more menacing undertone. There’s a ghost in their machine and we like it.

Born out of the buzz of the internet for sure,  but that they do what they do very well and we would be posting on them if one hundred or zero other bloggers had featured them.

Purity Ring - Obedear

Purity Ring - New Waves

Blogpop. It’s a term we referenced a few days back – slightly quirky, off-kilter pop music, usually birthed out of some sort of electronic base with beats and a floaty or slightly hazy atmosphere to it. There’s a lot of this stuff out there, partly because these days it’s so easy to do. Teenage boys and girls can do it in their bedrooms with ease, instead of other mischief that teenage boys and girls usually do upstairs when the parents are out. Then once the kids have made their musical babies, a swift bit of work on the internet and hey-ho with a bit of luck, you’re out there on the blogs.

The trouble is though, there’s far too much of this blogpop and much of it is very very average. Thankfully Purity Ring seem to have taken their name to heart and concentrated on making their bedroom based glitchy computerisations worthy of listening rather than getting on with anything more sordid. As a result blogs are picking up on them left, right and centre and at the risk of following the crowd we’re doing exactly the same, because Purity Ring very much fall into our category of fresh, cute, oddball, synthtopia with a twist in its tale that actually makes us want to go and make babies.

Purity Ring is Corin Roddick (music) and Meghan James (vocals). Check out the tracks below. Ungirthed will be released as a single on Monday, together with Lofticries as its B-Side through Transparent. There’s also a heaving and heavy remix from Manchester’s latest purveyors of cold-rave - Christian Aids - who despite owning the mystery / enigma band tag, we are led to believe contain amongst their number an ex-member of another Breaking More Waves kooky electro pop favourites - Run Toto Run who alas seem to have called it a day for now.

Ungirthed by PURITY RING

Lofticries by PURITY RING

Purity Ring - Ungirthed (Christian AIDS remix) by TransparentRecs