Magnificent in Purple

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 

Pink Milk return, with 'Awakening of Laura'

My favourite Scandi goth pop band are back!

For the uninitiated, I am referring to the excellent Pink Milk, aka Maria (vocals and drums) and Edward (guitar and bass), who I first became aware of last year when they released the glacially elegant but ferociously unyielding 'Detroit'. At the time, I likened it to "being engulfed in icy wind and rain, but in a good way", a sentiment I would still stand by. There followed the mighty 'Drömmens skepp’ (Ship Of A Dream)', a track that was commissioned for use on Swedish TV but wasn't used because it was just too unnerving. I've also just now discovered, via the bands Soundcloud, a frankly terrifying rendition of Foreigner's 'I wanna know what love is', which removes every ounce of saccharine sentimentality from the original and drives it screaming past Twin Peaks, Jesus And Marychain and My Bloody Valentine's territory into a sonic abyss from which it emerges ravished and wild eyed, like a Swedish Bang Bang Machine being fronted by Siouxsie Sioux.

'Awakening of Laura', the new single, sounds lighter and sparser in tone, but equally beautiful. It still has that icy brooding quality to it, but there is light amongst the dark, more Cocteau Twins than Banshees. It was inspired by the 1894 ballet The Awakening of Flora, and it heads up the bands debut album, Purple, which is out this autumn.

I am really looking forward to hearing it.