Pure Ecstasy - Voices - 7

Labels: Acephale Records
Review by: Andy Malcolm

Two songs of ultra-bloggable-ultra-hipster-ultra-indie on expensive vinyl from a most likely limited press. Who’s the sucker? Me, as usual. I guess the urge got too great, and I had to grab some vinyl by these guys whilst it was available, after falling for a few of their songs via the less enthralling medium of MP3 this summer. And whilst the music here is pretty darn lovely and exactly what I was hoping for, it isn’t half making me wish I had this bobbling round the turntable on the 21st July rather than the 21st of fucking October. Basically Pure Ecstasy completely rip off Real Estate, but go lower fi, and a big bundle on all the other cliche references that you drop into reviews of this kind of thing. Beaches, drugs, sunrises, sunsets, drugs, beaches, drugs on beaches, beach drugs, cliches, cliche hipsters, cliche hipsters on drugs, blogs about beaches… you get my point. Basically a whole bunch of stuff which is so far removed from my actual real life, and not at all the reasons why I like it. I like it because it’s any good. “Alexandria” consists of what is basically a warm bass riff looping over and over, some echoes, some reverb, some droning guitar sounds, and a guy going “oooooooooooooooooooh, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah” a lot. Fucking hippy. It’s great. Over on the a-side is “Voices” which is a real actual song, and I love it like, an awful lot. if your record rotation consists of just spinning Real Estate and Beach Fossils, then this is a song you could put on in between them, just to break things up a bit. Yeah drugs, yeah beaches, but to me, where I am drawing on actual plausible experiences that could happen to me for references, it sounds like I just had an extra spoonful of lemsip cold medicine and then climbed into bed, from the wrong end, and got lost in the duvet, and the duvet turned into cotton wool. This song is so killer. So worth it.