Pure X - Pleasure

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4...according to our Clinton on Fri 05 Aug, 2011.

I've been distracted slightly from reviewing this record by the arrival of FourFourTwo's Season Preview 2011/12 magazine in the office. Not long now, lads. Good to see Peter Reid still plying his trade as boss of League Two Plymouth Argyle. Anyway back to the "music". Well not quite yet. Apparently there is a graffiti artist in Leeds who goes round adding quote marks around shop signs for example 'Try our new delicious "chicken"' or '"Shoes" half price' etc, etc. Hilarious. Anyway a quick thumb through my old "reviews" marks this as a band I was told at the time were to be the next big thing, yet despite its obvious Jesus and Mary Chain, Mazzy Star, My Morning Jacket vibe I couldn't help but feel a little underwhelmed. The album starts out a little slow sounding like Jesus and Mary Chain playing Cowboy Junkies 'Trinity Sessions' underwater but as it wears on you start succumbing to their bleary eyed worldview and there are some marvellous moments to behold. Similar to the likes of Dirty Beaches they take their cue from a lost kind of '50s rockabilly, swathing everything in reverb and seemingly making the whole thing sound as shit as possible. This works really well on tracks like 'Easy' and 'Voices' which have a mysterious clouded atmosphere and the instrumentation backs away occasionally to leave the bass thumping away. They don't really veer from this sound although the fog lifts at times which could be frustrating depending on your ability to listen to very lo-fidelity music. They are at their best when keeping it simple. 'Surface' is a real standout sounding like 'I could Live in Hope'-era Low recorded in a lawnmower. It's tempting to lump these lot in with the hoards of other lo fidelity worshippers currently re-creating music from the past decades and skewing it through various tubes until it sounds like the worst thing ever recorded...it's just trying to work out whether the recording technique is by accident or design, ie. it's very easy to cover up a lack of songwriting nous in a barrage of detritus.

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First Pressing of 1000 with Gold Foil Stamped Cover. Pure X is the latest incarnation of a long-standing collaboration between Austin, Texas musicians and long-term friends Nate Grace, Jesse Jenkins and Austin Youngblood. Acéphale is proud to present their debut album. Looseness is a key concept for the band, and all songs were recorded live without overdubbing. The aspiration was to capture songs in their purest form, mistakes and all, as they were being written. Chasing a vibe in the studio allowed the songs to form themselves; structure and formula lost their rigidity as the songwriting process became more about meditative evolution than meticulous intent. Patient, sparse and never any less than heartbreaking, the clutch of songs making up Pleasure has a sonic originality that many artists spend entire careers trying to cultivate. That's not to be mistaken - Pure X are a Rock 'n' Roll band in the tradition's truest sense. There are clear influences here: the snarl and nonchalant bombast of the Jesus and Mary Chain, the wistful, lonesome croon of Hank Williams and the pure, lovesick melodies of 1960s soul music can all be easily perceived within the group's work to date. Crucially, however, Pure X do not let their reverence for such precedents overwhelm them. So where other lo-fi fetishists currently garnering attention tend to produce a facsimile of their inspirations, Grace, Jenkins and Youngblood dissect, invert and damage them. Bound to its influences only by its golden melody and bruised sentiment, the music of Pure X is a genuine, unafraid and honest foray into the emotive and redemptive potential of pop music; an endeavor that captures perfectly its indefinable ability to captivate and devastate in equal measure.