- Purple Pilgrims are a mysterious quantity. They’ve been drifting around the world -from New Zealand to Hong Kong to the US and back again- in a hazy cloud of echoes, donning vaguely cultish trappings and gently spinning out the jams. That’s been happening for the best part of a decade and yet their soft, fey presence has largely passed unnoticed here in Australia. That may be about to change with their new record, Perfumed Earth; we may get to find out exactly how weird the Purple Pilgrims are.
The sound of sisters Valentine and Clementine Nixon has grown out of the traveller, folky tradition of their parents. Losing their home to the Christchurch ‘quake in 2011, the pair kicked about, rootlessly across the country, before relocating entirely to their sometime, childhood home of Hong Kong. As is often the way with restless vagabonds, the Nixons have a knack for connecting with those they meet. One of the most significant encounters they had was with Ariel Pink and more specifically his collaborator, Gary War. I’m not quite sure where it happened but it resulted in a 2013 split release on Upset The Rhythm. It captured both artists in a state of transition: War separating his already highly experimental, psychedelic folk instincts from the increasingly bizarre trajectory of Pink and the Purple Pilgrims beginning to emerge from the sepulchral gloom of shadowy reverb that almost completely obscured their earliest recordings.
It’s an irony that -back then- Purple Pilgrims sounded a lot more like spooky ol’ John Maus than they do now, even though they’re only going on tour with him right now. You can trace a surprisingly consistent gradient across all of the sisters’ records, moving on into 2016’s (Not Not Fun released) Eternal Delight, with its poised, gothic and much less murky folk-pop and contemporarily, Perfumed Earth, which, bolder still, emerges more completely from the echoes of the past and reveals still more diverse songwriting and accomplished musicianship.
The Pink / War influence has come-of-age in the most satisfying fashion. Pink’s former fascination with the folk-pop of the ‘60s is on glorious display here. Take a song like I’m Not Saying, if you were to remove the remaining reverb, it would basically be The Seekers. I’m not even that big a Seekers fan, but this strangely eerie memory of their sound gives it just the right sort of weird twist. I think it’s Valentine who is the lead vocalist and her voice is not quite as big as the legendary Judy Durham’s, but it’s pretty considerable and is surprisingly versatile in the way it recalls -to me at least- a variety of great voices: from Kate Bush, though Siouxsie Sioux, Elizabeth Fraser and more. A trip through the Perfumed Earth offers a lot more too. A song like single, Two Worlds Apart, with its low-key jangle, seems like it was custom composed for the band’s signing to Flying Nun and has a guitar riff that would compare favourably to some of the better efforts by Johnny Marr.
Guest contributions net some great results like Jeff Henderson’s delicious sax solo that takes over the entirety of Delphiniums In Harmony. There’s a lot to appreciate on this record, but it floats along so easily you’ll almost certainly have to return, multiple times, to gather up what you’ve missed on previous occasions.
For all that Purple Pilgrims are still strangely otherworldly -retreating to remote, woodland compounds to record, sharing a strange psychic bond and shooting videos of bizarre, submerged rituals in white kaftans- in a way that defies every other cult that ever existed, the more they emerge from the murk of their past, the more relatable they become. Demystifying these sort of things usually results in unpleasant disillusionment, but the revelation of Purple Pilgrims is wonderfully real.
- Chris Cobcroft.