The Daily Spin, November 9
Purity Ring | shrines
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: shrines (2012)
Artist: Purity Ring
Link:
There are quite a few albums that have peaks and valleys, but so few reach the same ascendant highs and discordant lows that Purity Ring’s debut album shrines does.
In part, this is because of the genre. Purity Ring has established themselves as purveyors of blindingly bright shimmer pop underscored by wickedly tidal synths, aggressive waves of drum and bass-styled trap beats under ethereal vocals. It’s indie pop, but it’s not going to be like any indie pop you’re familiar with.
We’ll start with the bad and trend up, as this album does - I personally think the weakest track is the opener, ‘crawlersout’ - it feels unsteady, and though that’s possibly intentional, it’s a weird way to open an album, to be knocked off-kilter. The album finds footing later on - tracks like ‘cartographist’ introduce that off-beat unease with a great deal more finesse, but it’s a pretty tough misstep for an opener. I’ll chalk it up to youth.
When the album gets good, though. My god. Right around ‘cartographist’ and ‘belispeak’, the album morphs, becoming sleek and streamlined, exploding into these shards of fantastic noise, little bubbles that appear and pop with a near frantic energy. With ‘saltkin’, you really see the merger into trap beats that dance towards these towering heights, and that brings me to the two best tracks on the entire album - ‘obedear’ and ‘lofticries’. Back-to-back, every positive feature I’ve spoken to hits at once, the complete package twice over.
For a debut, this is wildly impressive, especially considering the experimental nature of the music at hand. Though it takes a moment to get going, like any good climb, the view from the peak is well worth it.
Rating: 8.1/10
Best Tracks: obedear; lofticries
Worst Tracks: crawlersout; grandloves