Purity Ring
When Purity Ring’s debut album Shrines was released in 2012, the band’s self-designated “future pop” found itself defining a genre that didn’t really exist. A blend of electronic-pop, British dubstep and hip-hop beats overlaid with singer Megan James’ high, clear voice, Shrines won critical acclaim and a legion of fans from across the musical landscape. In the few years since, it’s already begun to spawn imitators, making it even more essential for the duo’s follow-up to cement itself as an evolution of sound but still unmistakably Purity Ring. Their second album another eternity is mostly successful at crafting a great electronic-pop album.
The album artwork of another eternity shows a woman being suspended in the air against a pink backdrop, rising toward a huge glowing orb. It’s a concise image of the album’s sound; the synths and heavy bass notes are loud and swelling, but are tempered by gentler sounds like shimmering piano lines and hazy reverb. This is Purity Ring at its core; somehow managing to straddle the boundaries between trip-hop beats, indie pop ethereality and mainstream pop grandeur.
Lyrically, much of Shrines plays with deeply poetic, apocalyptic images of bodies as places and objects, featuring lines such as “I came down over the sleepy mountains / where our wide toes plunged / into the weeping shale to / tear our skin up off from the bottom” and “cut open my sternum and pull / my little ribs around you.” James has talked in interviews about the personal, inward focus of these songs, which give the entire album an eerie sense of darkness that’s all the more apparent when contrasted with her vocals and the catchy pop sounds of the synths and beats.
Another eternity is certainly a Purity Ring record, but much of that dark introspection has turned outward and become more focused on interactions and relationships with others. James sings “you” far more often. Take, for example, “you push and you pull / but you’d never know / I crept up inside you and I / wouldn’t let go” (“Push Pull”) and “you be the moon I’ll be the earth / and when we burst / start over o darling” (“Begin Again”). Shrines is an excavation of the darkness inside a person, peeling back layers of his or her body until whatever strange, surreal things inside could see the light. Another eternity is what happens when that person is sewn back together and enters the real world, with its billions of other people, and tries to connect to someone else. James’ approach to love and desire isn’t radically different from her look at herself; it’s downright bizarre, tinged with doom, but relentlessly mesmerizing.
Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on your sensibilities — this loss of the almost gothic darkness of Shrines may represent the loss of one of the band’s key elements. Another eternity is more comfortable in the world of pop music than Shrines; it relies more on loud anthem choruses and is overall more of a mainstream effort. It lacks the jittery, unsettling sense of horror that lurked on the edges of Shrines. Whether this constitutes a step backward is largely up to individual sensibilities.
Another eternity may not be as vitally distinct and mesmerizing as Shrines, but it’s still the work of two talented musicians that stands leagues above the other albums in its genre. This album is far more comfortable with the “pop” of “future pop” and isn’t afraid to just be big and catchy. If another eternity were just an elaborately constructed record of good synth-pop, it would still be a great record, but add James’ voice and lyrics, and it becomes something far more moving and enchanting.
