by rudyards | September 1st, 2011
Pure X (Austin, TX)
Pure X is the latest incarnation of a long-standing collaboration between Austin, Texas musicians and long-term friends Nate Grace, Jesse Jenkins and Austin Youngblood. Acephale is proud to present their debut album, Pleasure, released July 5th in the US and worldwide August.
Looseness is a key concept for the band, and all songs were recorded live without overdubbing. The aspiration was to capture songs in their purest… form, mistakes and all, as they were being written. Chasing a vibe in the studio allowed the songs to form themselves; structure and formula lost their rigidity as the songwriting process became more about meditative evolution than meticulous intent.
Patient, sparse and never any less than heartbreaking, the clutch of songs making up Pleasure has a sonic originality that many artists spend entire careers trying to cultivate. That’s not to be mistaken - Pure X are a Rock ‘n’ Roll band in the tradition’s truest sense. There are clear influences here: the snarl and nonchalant bombast of the Jesus and Mary Chain, the wistful, lonesome croon of Hank Williams and the pure, lovesick melodies of 1960s soul music can all be easily perceived within the group’s work to date. Crucially, however, Pure X do not let their reverence for such precedents overwhelm them. So where other lo-fi fetishists currently garnering attention tend to produce a facsimile of their inspirations, Grace, Jenkins and Youngblood dissect, invert and damage them.
Bound to its influences only by its golden melody and bruised sentiment, the music of Pure X is a genuine, unafraid and honest foray into the emotive and redemptive potential of pop music; an endeavor that captures perfectly its indefinable ability to captivate and devastate in equal measure.
