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Reuter/Boddy, "Pure"
There won't always be room for new, instrumental, and rhythmicelectronic music. Albums like this one suggest that only so many synthpads and sampled instruments can be combined in an entertaining andquality way. At first Pureis a pretty album—sliding like a slow mass of ice over the surface of astill body of water.DiN
There are warm tones bubbling up and over thesurface of this ocean and the water's rhythm provides nothing but asoothing cushion of air on which to relax. Over the course of the firstfive tracks this same feeling is reproduced in slightly varying ways:guitars stretch and crack, pseudo-pianos jumble against each other, andfairly straight-forward guitar solos dominate the mix of electronicpercolation. Sadly this is all the album has to offer; one completerotation through this record reveals a monotonous production that neverallows any of the synthetic strings to stand out as anything more thanpassing scenery: listening to this record is much like trying to catchall of the details in the trees on the side of the road while passingthem by at one-hundred miles per hour. It isn't as though the music ismoving by too quickly, but all the sounds end up blurring together inan unsatisfying way. There are exceptionally beautiful moments on someof the songs, but it is as if they are predictably beautiful. MarkusReuter and Ian Boddy can sequence and orchestrate music quite well, butthey limit themselves far too severely to produce more than one or twotruly engaging tracks. This kind of shimmering music feels as if it isstuck in time, undeniably in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Instead oftrying to escape from song structures that have long been worked out byother musicians, Reuter and Boddy both revel in sounds and structuresof a tired genre with a vague hope of making them sound moreinteresting.
There are warm tones bubbling up and over thesurface of this ocean and the water's rhythm provides nothing but asoothing cushion of air on which to relax. Over the course of the firstfive tracks this same feeling is reproduced in slightly varying ways:guitars stretch and crack, pseudo-pianos jumble against each other, andfairly straight-forward guitar solos dominate the mix of electronicpercolation. Sadly this is all the album has to offer; one completerotation through this record reveals a monotonous production that neverallows any of the synthetic strings to stand out as anything more thanpassing scenery: listening to this record is much like trying to catchall of the details in the trees on the side of the road while passingthem by at one-hundred miles per hour. It isn't as though the music ismoving by too quickly, but all the sounds end up blurring together inan unsatisfying way. There are exceptionally beautiful moments on someof the songs, but it is as if they are predictably beautiful. MarkusReuter and Ian Boddy can sequence and orchestrate music quite well, butthey limit themselves far too severely to produce more than one or twotruly engaging tracks. This kind of shimmering music feels as if it isstuck in time, undeniably in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Instead oftrying to escape from song structures that have long been worked out byother musicians, Reuter and Boddy both revel in sounds and structuresof a tired genre with a vague hope of making them sound moreinteresting.
