Purity Ring is a Montreal/Halifax based duo comprised of Corin Roddick and Meagan James. Purity Ring make lullabies for the club, drawing equally from airy 90's r&b, lush dream pop, and the powerful, bone-rattling, immediacy of modern hip-hop. Meagan's remarkable voice is at once ecstatic and ethereal, soaring joyfully through Corin's carefully chopped beats, trembling synths, and skewed vocal samples. Trust me, this won't be the last time you see this duo on my blog. Purity Ring are hardly strangers where grotesque imagery is concerned. Over the duo's earliest warped and downcast beats, the pair's singer Megan James toyed with mentions of bleeding hearts, fractured skulls, and heaps of bones. The more recent "Belispeak", too, quietly sung of holes drilled through the eye, oscillating somewhere dense and at times inaudible. But "Fineshrine" takes these bits of the band's dark lyrical character and puts them at the core of the track. "Get a little closer, let fold/ Cut open my sternum, and pull," James beckons on the chorus, with clear, synthetic glee.
Over a hiccuping beat, and with visceral care, she details a situation in which the object of her affection gets literally under her skin, rubbing against her ribs and lungs, to "make a fine shrine" inside her body. The vocals here are only minimally twisted, instead relying on James' own exuberant and poetic phrasing to remain unsettling, with allusions to sliced, bleeding skin for the sake of her sacred acquisition. The idea of a shrine itself tends to reference relationships with unreciprocated intensity, something depressed within a romantic context. "Fineshrine" evokes those sentiments powerfully, making it Purity Ring's finest track yet.
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