你去年底看到Pitchfork的年度100首歌曲榜单，可能因为列表实在太长而忽略了Purity Ring的名字；当你隔着大洋读今年SXSW的回顾，可能读着英语的文字无法感受这个乐队的现场究竟如何；但是当你发现微博上开始陆续有人提到这个名字，你可能隐约感受到，在大洋的对岸，这个乐队已经红了。Purity Ring是由会点钢琴的23岁女主唱Megan James和20岁的鼓手Corin Roddick组成的一个加拿大双人乐队。惊奇的人，两个人平时其实不住在同一个城市，一个在蒙特利尔，一个哈里法克斯，所以他们几乎所有的歌都是通过无数个邮件和电话完成的。 两人在去年才发行了首支7寸单曲“Ungirthed”，随后便迅速引起了像是Pitchfork之类媒体的注意。而在今年3月的SXSW前后，他们和Chad Valley、Grimes、Neon Indian 这样已经成名的艺人同台演出，丝毫没有怯场，给更多人留下了深刻的印象。因为同为女声电子的关系，不少人拿他们和The Knife还有Crystal Castles相比，但在我看来，他们少了The Knife 北欧式的阴暗和冷酷，少了Crystal Castles的电子暴力感，而多了一份属于自己的纯净和空灵。 乐队首张专辑《Shrines》会在7月24日在4AD发行。或许，同厂牌的Gang Gang Dance和tUnE-yArDs才是他们更好的参照。
Purity Ring make lullabies for the club, drawing equally from airy 90s R&B, lush dream pop, and the powerful, bone-rattling immediacy of modern hip hop. Megan’s remarkable voice is at once ecstatic and ethereal, soaring joyfully through Corin’s carefully chopped beats, trembling synths, and skewed vocal samples.
Despite the band’s young age (Corin is 21, Megan 24) and short gestation (they formed in late 2010), Purity Ring have delivered one of 2012's most assured – and anticipated – debuts with Shrines. Indeed, Shrines feels like anything but a first record - its vocal hooks are inescapable, its lush production futuristic and sophisticated but also as pristine as anything on pop radio. The record's 11 tracks trace a unique aesthetic universe that is carefully crafted and fully realized - deftly walking the lines between trap-rap exhilaration and otherworldly rapture, pleasure-center pop and diaristic emotion, childlike dread and total self-possession. Purity Ring's is a universe that invites exploration and demands revisiting.
Corin & Megan grew up in and around Edmonton, Alberta where they were an integral part of that city's small, tight-knit all-ages DIY music community. They toured extensively together in the band Gobble Gobble (now Born Gold), with Corin on drums and Megan singing. In the midst of a six-month-long tour, Corin's love of R&B and hip-hop grew, and he began experimenting with beat-making in Ableton Live. He asked Megan to lay down vocals on a song called 'Ungirthed', and Purity Ring was born. The song made its way online in January of 2011 to immediate international acclaim, and thus the two were suddenly faced with the daunting task of turning a studio project into a real band. To meet the challenge, Megan and Corin spent nearly 6 months conceiving of a live show that could do justice to the unique music they were recording.
It shows. Every element of Purity Ring's live presence has been carefully considered — from the clothes they wear (all designed and handmade by expert stitcher Megan) to the tactile, hybrid musical instrument / lighting machine that Corin built himself. The resulting spectacle can't be overstated: infectious vocal leads chopped and screwed improvisationally, synth leads and lighting triggered live with a drummer's precision. Purity Ring's performance is a lived synaesthesia that transcends the pitfalls often associated with live electronic-based music. Of course, perhaps the most exciting thing about Purity Ring is the overriding sense that these live performance innovations and their exceptional debut Shrines are merely the beginning of a collaboration whose remarkable chemistry is sure to bear much more to come - future pop, in every sense of the phrase.