It's harrowing and downright depressing listening at times, but the best art often comes from the worst of situations; an album like this needed to exist, and I'm glad it does.
Crawling Up The Walls [sic] is a very fine follow up that sees them once again exploring the inner workings of their soul and psyche with often beautiful results.
Crawling Up The Stairs should be praised not only for its beauty, honesty and sonic specialty, but also for the way it’s sequenced. Listening through the album takes you on an emotional journey that it’s clear that Pure X have carefully mapped out.
It’s an album that happily draws upon familiarity as a ruse, a means to take the listener somewhere far hazier and less comfortable. It’s bleak and bittersweet, and it’s very well done.
It may not be as instantly gratifying as Pleasure, but it's more sophisticated and self-aware.
It’s an album of stitched-together aspects that feel incongruous, though interesting.
Whilst often brilliant, ‘Crawling…’ makes you wonder why Pure X have swapped pleasure for pain.
‘Crawling Up The Stairs’, then, is the sound of a band staring down the invasive drag of their own instruments and winning.
While the more standard production helps peel away a few layers of distortion, Crawling Up the Stairs is a pretty bleak picture when observed without Pure X's unique filtering.
Texan trio Pure X's second album doesn't so much invite you in for a chat as sit you down and stare you in the eye until things get uncomfortable.
Crawling Up The Stairs has strong riptides that have no qualms over carrying you away, but if you embrace them you may be pleasurably surprised.
Crawling smartly plays upon Pleasure‘s strengths, but even with a more professional sheen coating the disc, Pure X needs to write stronger songs to fit with their talents.
1 | Crawling Up the Stairs 2:59 | |
2 | Someone Else 3:30 | |
3 | Written in the Slime 2:33 | |
4 | I Fear What I Feel 4:05 | |
5 | Things in My Head 2:39 | |
6 | Shadows and Lies 3:41 | |
7 | I Come From Nowhere 3:16 | |
8 | Never Alone 4:17 | |
9 | How Did You Find Me 2:41 | |
10 | Thousand Year Old Child 4:55 | |
11 | Rain at Dawn 2:27 | |
12 | All of the Future (All of the Past) 3:58 |