another eternity

Producer Corin Roddick's tinny percussive loops, pitch-shifted vocal samples, and bass drones continue to make a fine pairing with singer Megan James's deceptively unassuming vocals.

This brooding, almost gothic feel is the key to this album’s success, and proves that Purity Ring are far more complex than their surface lacquer of innocence may have led us believe.

Producer Corin Roddick crafts stark tracks that find a middle ground between lustrous synth pop and the plush, cavernous hip-hop of hot producers like Mike Will Made It — a sound that's perfectly suited to James' sensual, unburdening lyrics.

‘Another Eternity’ is a far more mainstream-sounding album than their 2012 debut ‘Shrines’, but it’s also rooted in sounds from the underground.

The beats are meticulous, the drops colossal, but the album fails to envelop its listeners as completely.

The result is Another Eternity, a solid but uneven album and a worthy successor to Shines, but also a victim of the sophomore slump.

It's difficult to tell when another eternity builds on Shrines and when Shrines is being stripped for parts.

This feels like little more than a competent game of catch-up for three years away, with Purity Ring now following in the footsteps of others, in a genre where they once led the pack. 

It is, most simply put, an overthought record. And at its worst, another eternity unfortunately struggles to distance itself from the post-EDM wasteland of FM pop.

Since 2012, pop music has gradually remade itself in Purity Ring's sonic mold, and Corin Roddick's production is no longer so innovative or novel in the grand scheme.

For all its pop production savvy, it rarely has the songs to back it up.

After a debut that spent much of its time slinking like crawlers out in the shadows, it’s intriguing - if slightly disconcerting - to see Purity Ring in a warmer light.

This brittle, torrid world has little light and shade.

The problem is that the ten songs are so busy in their productions but so hermetically sealed in their pop formalness that they eventually end up feeling claustrophobic and ultimately redundant.

This maximalist approach to Another Eternity feels indirect and arbitrary, like a child bashing away at his favourite sounds on a toy keyboard.

There remains the faintest hint of gothic romance, a kind of Dead Can Dance Class. But you are likely to slip off trying to locate any kind of edge.

It’s not that Purity Ring have gone backwards, it’s just that in the future they predicted they look slightly less interesting and, in trying to come to terms with that, Another Eternity ends up falling between two stools.

Purity Ring's latest record strips the mysticism out of their sound, and replaces it with a plush, gritless aesthetic.

In replacing their alien atmospheres with something a little more immediate, they’ve lost what was initially inviting to those other artists: they were outsiders, capable of great oddities and darkness.

Where Shrines felt grounded, reeking with earthy unease, Another Eternity’s more procedural compositions form a sugar-frosted fortress in the clouds. And it suffers for it.