Album Review: Purity Ring - Shrines

After dropping several praise-worthy singles last year across several labels, including one of the 2011's best tracks in Belispeak, Purity Ring have finally followed up with a full-length that shows they're more than capable of sustaining both their sound and their quality across an entire album.

Resolutely dark, Shrines seems intent on pushing the acceptable boundaries of pop music. The songs here are consciously outside of the mainstream – glitchy, heavily processed and distinctly unsettling – but there's a gloss to the production and a catchiness to the writing that gives them obvious crossover potential. Certainly the slow, rhythmic nature of the tracks will see them sitting comfortably on any number of dancefloors towards the latter end of the night. The lyrics, when audible, are interestingly perverse; sensuous, violent and body conscious in a way that David Cronenberg would approve of. More often they are shrouded in effects, Megan James' high, breathy vocals drenched in reverb and left to sit as a counterpoint to the slow, unsettling bass lines. While each individual song is high quality, the album is perhaps a little too consistent and the steady tempo and mood can leave the listener worn out after a full run-through.

Pieced together from a collage of electronic sounds from the last two decades – sparkling synths from the '90s, the washed-out melodies of Tri Angle's roster of downtempo acts, the heavily processed vocals of witch-house – there's something instantly familiar about much of Purity Ring's work, but the combination is much greater than the sum of its parts and Shrines ends up being both surprisingly unique and one of the most perfectly crafted examples of the 'present' out there today.