Purity Ring - Womb

April 3, 2020 - 4AD

There’s so much blood down there.

— Megan James, ‘silkspun’

A womb is in a constant cycle of expansion and contraction. It heightens your awareness of other patterns like the global weather, gravity’s pull on the oceans, the movement of the earth, the season’s effects on terrestrial life, your pulse. The bond between these cycles can be close if you pay attention. I viscerally remember the first time I became aware of my body’s internal changes as someone with womb-hood. I’ve spent my entire adult life so far trying to track and understand it, because it is something I am afraid of. It’s like having a mysterious, living cavern of horrors and wonders within you. The possibility to create greatness or destruction, or not. Doctors understand somewhat, but no one can really know that space as well as the one who wields it within them.

Motherhood is almost a perfect metaphor. No matter how many religions exalt it, how many starstruck musicians sing of it, how many artists paint it, how many psychoanalysts analyze it, how many feminists adopt it as a cannon, how many comedians mock it, how many doctors study it, how many mothers become it, it will remain relevant to us until our species is on the brink of extinction. Because of this breadth of anthropological baggage, it’s a heavy metaphor to take on, very cumbersome and awkward to hold.

Canadian indie pop band Purity Ring pulled that gauntlet up from the stone like a knife from soft butter. Womb, their first album release in five years, explores the mysterious cavern as a mechanism for framing power, pleasure, sorrow and terror. I’m sure the concept was irresistible—one of Purity Ring’s signature strengths is the use of bodily imagery to express complex human experiences and emotions in prophetic proportions. They love creating albums with central concepts. And it turns out, the womb is a highly effective tool for talking about almost anything human. 

What I find impressive about Womb the album, though, is how personal the songs become when you listen to them. I never could dream of expressing the grief of becoming something as well as they can with their lyrics. I can feel myself becoming a human lamp in the darkness, turning the room red by wrapping my skin around the light source to capture warmth in ‘rubyinsides.’ I can feel the shock of electricity in the watery sand of an hourglass slipping through my fingers in ‘pink lightning.’ I can feel the birth of the new-day sun as it breaches the mountaintop in ‘vehemence,’ a mother’s hope that the son will save her from herself. Even if my logical mind struggles to describe what the songs are about to other people, my body intelligence connects. I can empathize on a corporeal level, and the thinking mind follows. I think that shows serious poetic chops. Our time alive cycles between becoming aware of then forgetting the body, because the mind is a survival mechanism designed to distract from physical pain. Purity Ring somehow has found a way to capitalize on this oscillation with lyrics over dreamy synths, and that is how their music (for me at least) has been able to remain interesting. They can create auditory-tactile synesthesia. 

In terms of production and composition, Womb is right where I expected it would be. They have developed in compositional maturity with each successive album release (this being their third) but remained true to what works for them. Corin Roddick’s epic blooming booms and dreamy synths are layered in a way that makes it difficult to tell what’s on top at any given moment. There’s a wide expanse of production space around the sound to give a sublime pop-from-a-mountaintop sensation, trip-hop beats, and a placement of Megan James’s vocals so they ring without defined edges like a brilliant ethereal shadow. Chord progressions oscillate between minor and major moments, escalating the mystery. (Ears know minor keys mean mysterious messages, and we simple humans can’t get enough of the resolution from minor to major. That action is primal like walking out of dark discovery back into the sunlight.)

All in all, a strong release from Purity Ring for the new decade. For me, it’s a reminder that my heart is breaking, my youth is waning, and its endless feelings are gone. A past that is no longer present of limitlessness and weightlessness, things I crave in a world where I’m weighed down by the stones I collected and put on top of myself for armor. At least there is still music here to remember it by and return my head to my body. ☔

WOMB, an album by Purity Ring on Spotify