Pure X

Austin band Pure X went through several shifts as their sound evolved, moving from humid, atmospheric ambient rock on their earliest material into more refined songwriting on their 2014 album Angel. After six years of semi-dormancy, Pure X offer up the most straightforward reading of their drifty, dreamlike sound on their self-titled fourth album. The band had been moving toward clearer presentations of their songwriting for years, but even when stripping away some of the layers of heavy reverb and delay, the arrangements could sometimes still feel overwhelmingly full. Here, Pure X rely on spare, straight-ahead guitar rock. Songs like Angels of Love and kick-off track Middle America consist of charged, overdriven guitars and melancholic vocal melodies. Instead of the druggy Wall of Sound the band created before, the stripped-down arrangements expose more of the lonely, dissatisfied emotional currents that have long been at the heart of their music. Moody, exasperated songs like Free My Heart fall somewhere between jangly 80s college rock and dream pop contemporaries like Woods or a less passionate Dehd. There are also hints of deeper songwriting that got obscured in the dense production of earlier albums. The dragged-out timing of the riff that Fantasy is built on and the haunted vocal harmonies on Hollywood are new techniques for Pure X and take the songs to unexpected places. Amid some of the bands most intriguing songs are some tracks of nondescript sleepiness, but like all of their albums, this one is more about the cumulative listening experience than stand-out tracks. Even presenting their most direct and tuneful material, Pure Xs main talent is still creating a slow-moving, album-length mood that hangs suspended somewhere between bliss and regret. ~ Fred Thomas