A Pleasure

(Shoe grazers)

I'm fallen prey to the charm of a new album. Not new; new to me. It's called Pleasure by Pure X. The band name and the title are a perfect marriage. It's slow, shoegazey psych rock with a slight sprinkling of pop, just enough to get the heart carbonated. Straight from the opener the band lets you know they are going to lull you into the fuzziest, most blissfully sedate dream state you can imagine. After the brief opener, which sounds like a liquid echo transformed into rising vapor coming up off of steamy, candlelit bathwater, they launch into a Jesus and Mary Chain-esque opiate groove that makes you want to stare at a ceiling while coming down off of good ecstasy with a beautiful, naked girl on your arm. Believe me - it's a feeling I know. The song is called "Dream Over" for fuck's sake; what do you think it's about?

There's an oddly indifferent quality to the album which creates a tone that is so cool it's almost bashful. The vocals often hide shyly behind such thick walls of sound that the listener has to strain to hear them. This is most beautifully represented by the track "Easy." "Surface," the longest song on the album, has a smooth, sexy, droning sound that borders on hypnotic. Near the end of the song high pitched keys squeal, they warble and bend out from the speakers in ribbons and tickle the tired synapses in your mind. It is perhaps the song which most embodies the soft listlessness this album produces, even more than the title track, "Pleasure." 

It's a great listen, start to finish; a pleasure.

I was home sick today and had it on repeat while I bored through Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It took me many more months than it should have, but I finally finished it today. Now I'm free to move onto the finer things, like Nabokov.

My skin stinks of disuse, and of fevers. It smells like warm bedsheets and stale air. Something about this is enjoyable, though. It smells real.