Purity Ring’s fairy tale melancholy

The first time I heard of the band Purity Ring was when a close friend of mine sent me their song “Ungirthed.” I was immediately hooked.

Composed of two Canadians, Megan James and Corrin Roddick, who sing and play the instrumentals, Purity Ring resounds with an astonishing sense of a Grimm Brother-esque ambiance. Partially due to James’ dreamy and mythical lyrics and Roddick’s imagination with the electronic sound, taking it into previously unexplored areas, Purity Ring excels with their debut “Shrines,” becoming a breath of fresh air in a genre overflowing with tawdry Dubstep.

If you’re expecting the fast and furious music that the electro genre so often delivers, then “Shrines” will give your ears a treat. The album doesn’t provide instant gratification for listeners, but rather, makes them take time to digest and relish in the music.

With a wide variety of different beats and styles that creates an innovative sound, songs like “Lofticries” echo throughout the childhood that we all read about in fairy tales — inhabiting those foreboding woods which we were told never to go visit. “Cut open my sternum and pull,” James tells us, and we do pull as we listen to the rest of the album. Listeners cut from the warped and unexplored frontier of Alberta where the duo grew up and pull from serenity that the drone of untamed wilderness can only provide.

“Let it seep through your sockets and ears into your precious fractured skull,” which is exactly what “Shrines” does. It seeps into your very being and into those melancholy regions of your brain where you can’t cradle it. Find it, run your hand over it or try to glue it all back together again; what you decide to do is your choice, but Purity Ring reminds us that sometimes a good dose of fairy tale melancholy can go a long way.