“Thru Evry Cell” by Purple Pilgrims

Purple Pilgrims  have just released an LP ‘Eternal Delight’ – on 26 February on the US label Not Not Fun. Here’s what may be an atypical song from them and from the album.

“Thru Evry Cell” is the most conventionally song-structured recording I’ve heard so far from Purple Pilgrims. But even here they manage to sound utterly dislocated from everyday reality, particularly the way the voices are almost lost in a narcotic haze of lush reverb.

This is great – it’s breezy, full of pop hooks and a welcoming production. But at the same time it manages to still carry some not-quite-right menace in a similar way to Julee Cruise’s “Twin Peaks” soundtrack songs. In fact if David Lynch is looking for some music for the proposed new series of “Twin Peaks” he would find a perfect fit with Purple Pilgrims.

Maybe it’s just a sense from listening to  their previous recordings, but it seems like there’s a shadow behind every apparently bright and colourful sounding moment here and a sense of foreboding that there is something lurking in those shadows which seeks each listeners’ soul.

Here’s a Radio NZ video of the song performed in their Coromandel base.

There’s a video for another song from the album – “Forever” – on Vimeo here. Can’t wait to hear the whole album now.

 

“June” by Anto Pascoe

Day #18 of the May Month of Madness Marathon for NZ Music Month is “June” from the strange, melancholy, reverberating world of Anto Pascoe.

This weird but wonderful combination of reverb-drenched lo-fi keyboard pop-noir seems to channel equal parts East River Pipe, Galaxie 500 and early Beach House. There’s some guitar in here too, but it sounds like it’s being played in a concrete basement, a flight of stairs away from the microphone.

The album, called “To Escape”, is a cassette release from Christchurch label Melted Ice Cream. It’s great. Anto’s voice – often rising to a ghostly falsetto – and the sparse instrumentation blurred and softened by almost infinite delay, all add an enervated, washed out melancholy that’s much more fun than it might sound.