edenism

Here is the “pop band of the future” (Purity Ring) making the pop music of the past (80's-tinged pop). Music of the past not only because of the retro-influences, but because the 80's revival of the 2010s is already passé, years after Emotion (2015) and Haken's Affinity (2016). And Purity Ring doubles down on the risky play: if Womb is set apart from these albums stylistically, that is because it is not concerned with the music of the 80's but with the cinematics. Often sounding like a movie soundtrack with lyrics like “riding your bicycle into the night”, Womb is more a spiritual successor to Stranger Things than to 1989.

Gone are the sparkling anthems of Another Eternity, replaced by pulsating, subdued, introspective dances. Tracks like Femia feel like the loneliness of tripping at a party, pressed among masses of bodies. With every insight, birth, and growth, comes a death and a loss, and this celebration/mourning is where Womb lingers; always pausing on the threshold. The effect is similar to Carly Rae Jepsen's Chekhovian vignettes, but turned much further inward and toward abstraction. If 80's revivalism is witnessed by musical Mary Magdalenes, then Womb follows Judas at the moment of betrayal. Always “a storm is coming. I can feel it in my scars,” but the moment of metempsychosis never comes.

(And this is true of the album itself: rather than being a vessel for the spirit of the 80's (maybe Songs from the Big Chair), Womb is content with letting the spirit haunt the grounds, like the chapter “Time Passes” in To the Lighthouse.)

At every moment Womb is understated, always circling around the object of mourning, but never fully erupting into jouissance, so on a track-by-track basis the album may not be impressive, but as a whole there is a coherence and grandeur that shows an ambition far beyond Purity Ring's previous works.