Purity Ring - Another Eternity

Right away, I’m pretty disappointed by this album. It represents an unfortunate cross-roads between two common blights on sophomore releases. Firstly, reading the track listing is making me a little sick of the shtick that I thought that Purity Ring might have outgrown after their first album (when establishing a “brand” is all important). There’s track names like: Heartsigh, Bodyache, Dust Hymn, and Sea Castle. Are you seeing the pattern of hasty slapping together of nouns to suggest something profound? The other sophomore album trap that this release falls prey to is taking that kernel of rawness, that je ne sais quoi that’s in the first release, and over-producing it into oblivion.

Another Eternity is replete with mushy sameness that’s been brought on by a far too overzealous production. Repetition, for example, is exactly as dull as it sounds and on the whole it’s perfectly representative, as the whole first section of the album up until this point. I think what makes these tracks worse is the fact that Purity Ring’s songwriting seems to have reduced its scope from writing whole songs, to writing insipid twenty second hooks that loop around over and over again without any substance to them at all. The same irritating little melody gets swilled round in most of the songs of this album far too many times.

There are some moments in this album where something interesting happens in the production amidst the waves of boredom. For instance on Sea Castle, there’s a sort of rave-inspired instrumental that, whilst great, just doesn’t suit the vocal offering - in that it isn’t entirely rubbish. This review will be a short one, because there’s so little of note to be found in this album. The only track that I would consider returning to is Stranger Than Earth, which combines a perfectly good trap instrumental with the least repetitive vocal line on the whole release, coming together to form something that at least, isn’t irritating. Sorry guys, you should have stopped after your first album, because it looks like that’s all you had in you.