The Purrs' CD Release Party Sat. at the Sunset
(The CD release party for The Purrs' Amused, Confused, & More Bad News is this Saturday at the Sunset Tavern in Ballard, $7, 21+. With Black Nite Crash and Blood Red Dancers.)
Amused, Confused, & More Bad News, the third (or fourth, depending on how you look at it) studio album from local post-psych outfit The Purrs, comes across as guardedly autobiographical. Amidst the jangly guitar rock and fuzzed-out riffs, you can read the album as a document of the band's struggles since their 2005 debut, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. With songs like "Loose Talk" and "Taste of Monday" garnering regular play on KEXP, the self-released album did about as well as they could have hoped for. They signed to a local label, and things were looking good. Then, well, not much happened, or at least not the way it was supposed to.
The label re-released earlier material, pared down to meet the tastes of an illusory pop audience. The band toured widely and garnered more attention, but it was almost three years before they brought new material to market, with the album (again self-released) The Chemistry That Keeps Us Together, in 2007.
So when lead singer and songwriter Jima croons on the new track "Feeling Fine" that "Life on the road is OK/if your brain's like a summer job, short-term only," you can feel the tension to the band's work: exhaustion bordering on burnout, while at the same time there's the compulsion to continue the relentless process of being a rock and roll band, despite the lack of future certainty.
But broad themes aside, the new disc shows the band continuing to evolve into a more assured outfit. The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of was almost baroque with its elaborate song intros and musical references, all of which have been getting pared down over the last few years as the band concentrates more on song-craft. The Chemistry... showed that the band was capable of anthemic rock with tunes like "Chemicals for Me" (which also saw its fair share of KEXP rotation), and the band has followed up with at least two scorchers on Amused...: "Sister," which features both a delicious wah-heavy riff as well as the judicious use of acoustic guitar for percussive effect, and the fan favorite "Fear of Flying."
But the standout track is undoubtedly "The Outpost," possibly the single best song the band has written. It's Ziggy Stardust meets Galaxie 500, a sci-fi epic of loneliness and anomie carried along by the surging guitars of Bob Silverstein and Jason Milne. The Purrs have always been phenomenal at creating delicately textured tone palettes with lush guitar effects, and there's no better example of that than "The Outpost."
Today, the band may not be looking at mainstream break-out success, but their years of relentless touring have won them a dedicated fanbase based on the strength of their live shows. And their music has been popping up in television soundtracks with greater frequency over the past few years, most recently in David Duchovny's sex-drenched Showtime series Californication, whose world-weary themes of sex and emptiness the band's music is perfectly matched for.
So it's not exactly bitterness that informs Jima's lyrics on the new album so much as a sort of grudging acceptance. Exasperation with the rock scene is matched with a more mature awareness that there are other forms of success. Three albums in, The Purrs are writing some of their best material, and at least in part that's due to the fact that at some point, they realized that if they kept going, it was going to have to be for themselves.
