Angel, the third album from Austin’s Pure X, arrives less than a year after the claustrophobic, willfully difficult Crawling Up the Stairs. It was recorded in the pastoral ambiance of a remote, century-old dance hall in the band’s native state. The record features weepy string embellishments, plenty of slide guitar and a litany of song titles (“Valley of Tears,” “Wishin’ On the Same Star”) that could have been pillaged from any dust-covered honky-tonk compilation buried deep in thrift store vinyl stacks. All of which might serve to create a vivid — though wildly misleading — portrait of what the album actually sounds like. Angel has more in common with the slickly engineered roots rock of the bicentennial U.S. (see: Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Eagles) than, say, Hank William’s run of post-WWII hits. Circa 2014, such radio royalty could hardly be considered unconventional source material; Kurt Vile, the War On Drugs and the Men have already co-opted the most tasteful aspects of coke-fuelled classic rock, especially the kind of meticulous production that allows multiple layers of tenderly picked guitars to stream together as harmoniously as several small channels feeding into one big river. And while that particular lesson surely isn’t lost on Pure X, what’s unexpected about their approach here is how earnestly they employ the mid-‘70s FM tropes their peers have likely dismissed as utterly cornball — namely, nakedly romantic lyrics, 12-strings treated to sound like harps and synths treated to sound like raining glitter. [Source]
New Music United 