
Adorn me in feathers from dead birds...
Purity Ring are an electronic music duo from Canada, made up of vocalist Megan James and producer/instrumentalist Corin Riddick.Their music is best described as playful and chilled out, complemented by James' surreal lyrics.
Discography:
Albums:
- Shrines (2012)
- another eternity (2015)
- WOMB (2020)
The music of Purity Ring contains examples of:
- Album Title Drop: For Shrines, "Listen closely, closely to the floor/ Emitting all its graces through the pores/ You make a fine shrine in me/ You build a fine shrine in me" from "fineshrines". For another eternity, "Not even into/another eternity/will stop your lovely orbiting" from "Begin Again".
- all lowercase letters: another eternity and all the song titles on said album.
- Clean, Pretty Childbirth: Averted in "lofticries". The woman in the first vignette has given birth at home off-screen, but given the copious amount of blood between her legs, it was very messy.
- Dissonant Serenity: AG Rojas, who directed the music video for "lofticries", said: "'Lofticries' is a music video exploring the stoicism of psychically connected characters confronted by surreal, climactic moments. It is also a song off my favorite album of the year by Purity Ring." Indeed, the video features four vignettes in which its main characters react very stoically when they come across different scenarios.
- A man walks into his house to see that his girlfriend (or perhaps his wife) has given birth. After surveying this, he steps out of the house for a walk.
- A young man enters an abandoned pool, takes a makeshift hook lying on the ground, and tries to fish out a dead body there. After three unsuccessful attempts, he walks off with the hook, probably to get a better one.
- A woman takes a moment of refuge from the rain at a nearby garage, where a hearse is apparently being worked on. Inside the hearse is a glowing, pulsing light at the back, followed by a hand smacking the window, implying that the poor sap is Not Quite Dead. The woman leaves, apparently oblivious of the unusual phenomenon in the hearse.
- A man helps an invalid, pregnant woman up onto her wheelchair; the woman's womb also has this pulsing light.
- Eye Scream: "Belispeak" includes the lovely line "drill little holes into my eyelids, that I might see you when I sleep".
- Lighter and Softer: another eternity in comparison to Shrines; still lyrically strange, but the album sounds significantly sweeter than the first one did.
- Lyrical Dissonance: "Cut open my sternum, and pull my little ribs around you...", contrasted with the upbeat music of "Fineshrine." This sort of thing is prevalent in every song; Megan James has a very sweet voice and the music is often lively, but the lyrics are extremely morbid and strange.
- Lyrics/Video Mismatch: "begin again" is a semi-abstract love song about an on-again off-again relationship. The music video is a deeply abstract story about a young woman grown in the roots of a tree made of meat, who is sacrificed to give an old woman a new body to live in. Probably.
- Portmanteau: Most of the song titles on Shrines.
- Solar and Lunar: Begin Again has this motif. "My moon o my moon/Not even into/Another eternity/Will you stop your lovely orbiting"
- Textless Album Cover: Shrines, another eternity, and WOMB only have cover art, without any text.
- Word Salad Lyrics: "Sleep is a welcome gadget/ in our headbondhood/ The crawling animals will seek/ all things warm all things moist/ I will relentlessly shame myself/in rest in wake in front of/ my truly born beloved/for here I lie in wait/ Hush little heart."
- Yandere: Because of the surreal lyrics, many of their songs (especially Shuck and Fineshrine) have this undertone.
