In early 2011, Purity Ring showed us the perfect balance for "future pop": Be ahead of your time, but not toofar ahead."Belispeak" and "Ungirthed" perfectly anticipated the reframing of indie pop as festival-ready "Internet music", and when Shrines came out, about a year later, the Edmonton duo saw their star rise alongside the similarly-minded polyglots like Grimes, kindred spirits who helped shift the sonic paradigm further away from guitars. But if pop listeners come for the songs, they tend to stay for the personalities, and this is the issue facing Purity Ring on another eternity. On their debut, Megan James and Corin Roddick were hard to read and analysis-averse, and they remain so. Their sound remains singular, but is it still interesting?
Staying the course, as they largely do on another eternity, isn’t that risky a proposition for them: The pop world seems right about where Shrines left it. Accordingly, James and Roddick try to close the gap separating their vision of pop from actual pop. The bolder and brighter presentation of another eternity singles "push pull" and "begin again" gets them awfully close to latter-day Taylor Swift or Katy Perry; "repetition" could’ve popped up on If You’re Reading This It's Too Late or serve as a backing track for the next Miley Cyrus single, all acts whose 2013-2014 output drew liberally from Purity Ring.
But if Purity Ring don't have the advantage of novelty anymore, their aesthetic is strong enough that familiarity becomes a decent substitute. Within the first minute of another eternity, the ease of recognizing Purity Ring amongst their still-growing brood of imitators is actually startling. If the lower-case stylization of another eternity and its song titles seems overly precious, at least it’s congruent with James’ distinct vocal approach. She works something like an origami expert, quickly folding and refolding melodies until they’re acutely angled, pointed, and elegant.
James’ lyrics explore the same juxtaposition of delicacy and danger, though less so than on Shrines. She promised a more personal, present-tense perspective than her past work, and so her macabre, childlike fascination with bodily functions is applied to more adult situations, like breakups and such. At best, James’ impressionism leaves an imprint on your brain—on "repetition", the curious boast "Watching me is like watching the fire take your eyes from you" is delivered with enough gusto to hit at a gut level.
However, by posting the lyrics sheet prior to the release of another eternity, the duo revealed as many "o’ers" and leering, stiff turns of phrase as a Decemberists album ("Baby why don’t you see my sea/ Get inside and build your castle into me"). At times, the moony metaphors devolve into Wordsworth Tumblr-jumble, and on "stillness in woe", James achieves a sort of Purity Ring singularity with one line: "Meet me in the back shed/ I’ll be hanging up the knives/ Humming melodies that rhyme/ Building castles out of shovels."
It's this twee undercurrent that manages to keep Purity Ring nominally "indie", and also provides crucial contrast with Roddick’s productions. Roddick wants to remind listeners more of Mike WiLL Made It and Noah "40" Shebib than Burial and the Knife this time, and he makes everything sound more cushy and cavernous, evoking the sensation of sitting on the most comfortable couch in the club after everyone leaves. Throughout, Purity Ring manages to sound big without sounding expensive, forgoing nuance and detail for scalability. Stream it on laptop speakers and you can still picture every dazzling MIDI trigger in a live setting.
James and Roddick altered their process for another eternity, working together in the same studio, and as a result they seem to have gravitated towards the sort of tricks meant to provoke an immediate, contagious enthusiasm from the person standing right next to you. Credit to Purity Ring for being honest with themselves and acknowledging that they’ve spent the past couple of years playing festivals and collaborating with the bigger names in oddball mainstream rap (Angel Haze, Danny Brown, Ab-Soul). The beats that pop up during the hooks of opening duo "heartsigh" and "bodyache" are meant for bleacher stomping, while there are legitimate "Levels"-level drops on "begin again". Any sort of indignation feels misplaced—you might as well shake your fist at a rock song for containing a riff. But most of Roddick's "new" tricks could’ve ended up on Shrines, whether it's the apparitional, pitched-down vocals, flickering Auto-Tune, warped bass and a fairly brazen nick of Frank Ocean’s "Thinkin Bout You" on "stranger than earth". As a result, it's difficult to tell when another eternity builds on Shrines and when Shrines is being stripped for parts.
By every objective standard, even the one set by its near-suffocatingly cohesive predecessor, this is a narrow work. Eight of its 1o tracks clock in between 3:15 and 3:40, and its tone, timbre, topicality and flow are pathologically even-keeled; there’s nothing to upset the equilibrium like Shrines' jarring Young Magic guest spot "Grandloves". Verses and choruses are pretty much equidistant at all times. You can imagine another eternity as beat-tape like source material, where just about every melody could be extracted for outside hook use.
Perhaps we should’ve saw that coming considering the numerous allusions to repetition and new starts in both the album and song titles. But the most worrisome bit of referentiality comes not from Roddick's production or James' melodies, but from a recycling of Shrines’ most powerful image. That one came on "Fineshrine", where James experienced a love so overwhelming and frightening, she asked them to climb inside her rib cage. "seacastle" likewise views sexual congress as a supernatural escape plan and on "repetition" she echoes the favor from "Fineshrine"—"Climb up in my rattling spine and I’ll contract." This obsession with connecting and disappearing in rapid succession is fitting for a record that finds Purity Ring trying to stake their claim at pop's center but ultimately retreating within themselves.
