What strikes you most while listening to Purple, the debut album by Gothenburg's Pink Milk, is that these are not so much songs as experiments in sound. Free form compositions that sound as though they were crafted from the elements as much as from conventional drums and guitars.
This is probably an example of an album being sonically imbued by it's surroundings, for Purple was recorded on the isolated Swedish island of Gotland and mixed and produced by the band themselves. As such, there is a strong sense of sparseness and isolation to the finished album.
Pink Milk are Maria (vocals/drums) and Edward (guitar/vocals), and they have been going for two years now. Their first three singles, 'Detroit', 'Kill 4 U' and 'Awakening of Laura' are all here, along with their unnerving and doomed composition for Swedish television, 'Drömmens Skepp', and their initial sonic calling card; the frankly terrifying rendition of Foreigner's 'I Wanna Know What Love Is'.
As such, good things are expected from this album and the opening track, 'River Phoenix' certainly hits the spot and grabs the attention. A jagged guitar scythes through the silence, eerily, menacingly... It sounds very filmic, like the opening scenes of a gothic western or dark screwball fantasy based around some intangible idea of reckoning. It broods magnificently, achieving atmospheric wonders with guitar and reverb alone.
As 'Awakening of Laura' has shown, the band are capable of doing light as well as shade, but their strengths are jagged guitar work and brooding vocals, the sonic equivalent of lacerating wind and icy rain. These elements are strong on 'Muscles' and 'Sushi Dreams (Flesh & Blood)' but both 'Awakening of Laura' and the light and almost synthy 'Sans Toi' show that there is another side to them, the latter track sounding almost wistful, swirling around you like a cat made of fog. It sparkles like icicles.
This is a strong debut album for the band, and it has the air of a sonic manifesto, suggesting very much that this is just part one for them. That they will be back with more sonic landscapes in the future.
I can't wait.
Purple is out now on Black Hair Records
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