Are Brooklyn’s Purelink a boy band or a jam band? Properly, they’re neither; they’re three former Chicagoans making ambient music within the Y2K-era clicks + cuts custom, but these faintly disingenuous tags truly say rather a lot about what units them other than their forebears. Guys like Oval, Pole, Jan Jelinek and Vladislav Delay carried themselves with modesty, reserve, and dry Northern European humor; they didn’t seem to be folks you’d essentially wish to have a beer with. Purelink, in the meantime, are the sort of band you’d wish to be in: three 30-year-olds with impeccable music style and even higher networking abilities, driving south yearly to hyperlink up with artists like Ulla and Huerco S. at Kansas Metropolis’s C- events.
This sense of eagerness and irrepressible youth, the type you’d affiliate extra with a sparky younger rock band like Friko than three guys wired into their laptops, shines by on their second album, Religion. They’re not within the unreadability and weirdness that led quite a lot of their predecessors to call their tracks after snippets of information and cryptic non-words. They like brilliant timbres and billowing chords moderately than the spaciousness their forebears inherited from dub, cocooning the stereo discipline in midrange pad noise. The album caps at 38 minutes, far shorter than a CD-era sprawler.
Lots of this may be attributed to the straightforward indisputable fact that they’re a band; there weren’t quite a lot of these within the clicks + cuts period. The sunniness of their method can be attributed to the way in which they deal with ambient music as one thing communal, moderately than the solitary, personal apply of many laptop computer scientists. Whereas the one visitor on their 2023 debut, Indicators, was the cryptic J, Religion includes a conspicuous look from Loraine James, whose voice imparts a whisper of spliffy trip-hop paranoia on “Rookie,” whereas on “First Iota,” poet Angelina Nonaj muses on magnificence and artifice as guitars slash angrily throughout the area.
That Purelink are so good at replicating the exact sounds of the ’90s and ’00s solely emphasizes what differentiates them from their inspirations. Huerco should have handed them some tips of the commerce, as a result of no report since his personal Railroad Blues EP in 2015 higher reverse-engineers the pneumatic snaps Vladislav Delay perfected on his 4–album 2000 run: a sound sort of like a methane bubble escaping an ice thaw, or somebody smacking an train ball in a diving bell. “Kite Scene” undergirds its reluctant chord plucks with a schaffel beat, folding Wolfgang Voigt’s glam-rock-enamored tackle techno into their circle of influences.
