Another Eternity
Purity Ring
4AD
Teasing its way closer to mainstream pop, Purity Ring plays complex games of approach and evasion on its second album, Another Eternity. Then again, pop has been approaching Purity Ring, too, as pop, hip-hop and electronic dance music have raided one another’s ideas.
Purity Ring is a duo from Canada — Megan James on vocals and Corin Roddick on instruments — whose 2012 debut album, Shrines, was electronic pop filled with strategic holes of sound and sense. James’ high, ingenuous voice hopscotched through blithe melodies and cryptic, sometimes nightmarish lyrics; Roddick’s tracks played hide-and-seek around her, with silences where beats or bass lines might have been and notes that puffed up and disappeared like ragged breathing. Purity Ring went on to collaborate with rappers and dancehall reggae acts; meanwhile, directly or indirectly, some of Purity Ring’s blips and hollows were echoed in radio hits.
Another Eternity is at once more expansive and more transparent than Shrines. James’ voice has moved consistently into the foreground, with newly succinct melody lines and pretty, overdubbed choruses alongside trickier, computer-manipulated vocals. Roddick now deploys the arena-scale sounds of European trance — grandiose piano arpeggios, nebulous chords, buzzy bass lines, ratcheting snare drums — alongside the brittle, sputtering percussion samples of trap and the monumental bass and drum impacts of hip-hop producers like Mike Will Made-It. A song like Bodyache — with the stuttering, poppy chorus “I-I-I lied, now I’m lying awake/I-I-I cried until my body ached” — is only a few steps removed from radio hits by singers like Ariana Grande and Ellie Goulding.
Still, Purity Ring is stubbornly arty. Even as Roddick invokes electronic dance music, the songs resist dancing. Instead, they are crystalline dirges, with buildups that suddenly vanish and bass lines that sustain or slow down, deliberately impeding the rhythm instead of propelling it. And while James’ voice sounds guileless, her lyrics have stayed enigmatic. They hint at intimacies and separations, love and death, swirling together images of bodies and landscapes with brief moments of straightforward longing: “Where have I been/Why can’t you see me?” she suddenly wonders in Sea Castle. Why not? Because Purity Ring is better that way, verging on pop but maintaining a sense of mystery.
— JON PARELES, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Take This
Jacky Terrasson
Impulse!
Postbop pianist Jacky Terrasson has always cultivated a touch of whiz-bang in his music, but that doesn’t mean he panders. Since the release of his self-titled major-label debut just over 20 years ago, his art has communicated a deft intelligence sharpened by dynamic contrast. He tends to do his best work when he can ground his natural effervescence within the advanced mechanics of a working band.
Take This, Terrasson’s new album, isn’t so much about a band. Recorded in France, it’s a brisk showcase for an international rhythm coalition: bassist Burniss Earl Travis, from Texas; drummer Lukmil Perez, from Cuba; percussionist Adama Diarra, from Mali; and Sly Johnson, a French singer and beatboxer of African descent, formerly known as Sly the Mic Buddah.
The album title derives from Paul Desmond’s Take Five, which appears in a pair of loosely funky interpretations. Among the other covers, reframed with a similar spirit of play, are Bud Powell’s bebop touchstone Un Poco Loco and, less rewardingly, Gotye’s 2011 indie-pop hit Somebody That I Used to Know. A version of the Beatles’ Come Together finds Johnson in Bobby McFerrin mode, humming and thumping his chest as Terrasson kneads a groove in 9/8 meter.
Terrasson has made a habit, for better or worse, of cheeky pop flirtation. But the covers on Take This, innocuous and succinct, feel subordinate to a larger message of percussive buoyancy. The originals Dance and November offer two variations on Afro-Caribbean pulse, while Kiff is the latest evidence of Terrasson’s affinity for the groovy, mid-1970s Keith Jarrett.
The album’s focus on concision means that Terrasson’s more digressive urges go unfulfilled. That’s a fine reason to hear him at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola this Friday through Sunday with his current group, featuring Travis, drummer Justin Faulkner and Cuban percussionist Mauricio Herrera. Still, concision can be the best possible outcome, as it is on the album’s two ballads, Miles Davis and Bill Evans’ Blue in Green and a companionable, no less gorgeous original, Letting Go.
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Fast-Moving Clouds
Sarah Bethe Nelson
Burger
Sarah Bethe Nelson is a San Francisco singer-songwriter who played for the better part of a decade in a shaggy, mildly alternative roots-rock band called Prairie Dog, a group a little too comfy for its own good. In her late 30s now, she’s reinvented herself on Fast-Moving Clouds, her first solo record. It’s an album of decoys: It refers to musical and narrative simplicity, directly and often, but doesn’t quite believe in or surrender to it.
Start Somewhere begins crudely, but in its last 30 seconds the arrangements blossom with layered guitars. Suddenly it’s fizzy and beautiful, like a Fleetwood Mac song. That’s a strange way to play her hand: Why wait so long for the surprise? In Snake Shake, she deals out her lyrics intermittently. “I’d rather be a snake in a pool in the desert in the sun,” she begins. After a while, she sings, “I’d rather be one lone leaf on a shadow-strewn street stepped on by everyone” — another pause — “than to keep living like this.” But as the lyrics go through further cycles, the words become a multitrack round, and you start to hear other sounds: keyboards, piano, marimba. Suddenly simplicity isn’t the point anymore.
The album’s epic is Every Other Sunday, a monochord drone through its verses that shifts into double time and becomes a hypnotic jam. But its emotional center is a ballad called Paying, which moves from the blurry to the specific, like a rack-focus shot in a film. “Don’t ask me to say I understand when you know that I do,” she sings. “But this is the last time I’ll be saying those words to you.” She makes you wait until the chorus for you to get it: She’s the bartender. He’s a customer. “This is the last time that I’ll be making your drinks on the house,” she sings. “You’ll be paying, starting right now.”
— BEN RATLIFF, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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