This time last year was a trying time for Pure X: Nate Grace busted his knee skateboarding but didn't have insurance, multi-instrumentalist Jesse Jenkins was going through a breakup, and drummer Austin Youngblood moved to be with his girlfriend in Los Angeles. While all that was going on, they were also working on Crawling Up the Stairs, the follow-up to their splendidly hazy debut LP, Pleasure. Instead of recording everything live as they did before, Pure X took an arduous year-and-a-half to record C.U.T.S., as they call it, sparing no attention to detail.
Where Pleasure unfurls like a drop of ink in a glass of water, Crawling Up the Stairs has a plan. "There's kind of a hard descent," Jenkins explained, "and the rest of the record is a slow ascent back up to reality." Pure X also made a studied departure from the feedback and reverb that occasionally muffled Pleasure's finer textures. On Crawling Up the Stairs, they looked for guitar sounds "like glass knives slicing through your eardrums," influenced by Nashville's golden era of high-polish production, and honed in producer Larry Seyer's studio, Electric Larryland. The diamond-cut dulcimer that opens "Thousand Year Old Child" sounds more at home on a sunlit Brooklyn rooftop than the dark, dusty Texas basements in which it originated, and the bowed piano splintering the end of "Never Alone" feels almost three-dimensional. When the guitars do squall, they radiantly explode into being instead of burning low and dirty, as they did on Pure X's earlier releases.
Sometimes this clarity comes at the expense of the smoldering noise that made their last album so sensual, but Pure X make up for lost immediacy by giving a lot more attention to Crawling's vocals. Rustling whispers and conspiratorial voices on "Shadows and Lies" are the perfect companions to Grace's rangy, paranoid wails. In fact, it's almost a relief to hear him totally lose it for once, howling himself ragged on "How Did You Find Me" instead of keeping his voice at a safely reverbed distance from the listener. After Grace rips his throat apart, Jenkins-- who, for the first time, shares singing duties-- is there to pick up the pieces with his sweet and haunting falsetto. Despite Grace's injuries, it's Jenkins who sings, "The pain in my body is so great" on "I Fear What I Feel", reaching high octaves of pain repeated across several lines like a dull, throbbing ache.
Jenkins has said Pure X won't make their next record the same way they made Crawling Up the Stairs, which makes sense-- how many times can a band have a collective nervous breakdown?-- but hopefully they'll find a few takeaways from the creative process behind their second album. It may not be as instantly gratifying as Pleasure, but it's more sophisticated and self-aware.
