House Playlist: Purity Ring, Atlas Sound, & Wavves

There’s an undeniably sinister undertone to Purity Ring’s new single, “Belispeak.”

House Playlist: Purity Ring, Atlas Sound, & Wavves

Purity Ring, “Belispeak.” There’s an undeniably sinister undertone to Purity Ring’s new single, “Belispeak” (half of a split 7” with Braids), but it’s curiously, ingeniously even, juxtaposed with the group’s signature minced-and-looped vocal samples, which immediately bring to mind the Cover Girls and various other Latin freestyle acts from the ’80s. Still, the track is notably darker than Purity Ring’s debut single, “Ungirthed”—its synths chillier (even creepily morphing into the sound of bug legs clicking together) and its lyrics more unsettling: “Drill little holes into my eyelids/That I might see you when I sleep.” That’s love, folks. Sal Cinquemani

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Atlas Sound, “Terra Incognita.” “Terra Incognita” is a lovely introduction to Bradford Cox’s upcoming Parallax, an album title that unfortunately brings to mind the villain from one of this summer’s worst comic-book adaptations, Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern. Much unlike that hideous glob of interstellar slime, “Terra Incognita” is ethereal yet grounded, speaking of otherworldly concepts but far too attached to its home planet to venture into the foreboding limitlessness of outer space. “I kept cars and caravans close to me, yeah/In case one day I need some company,” sing-speaks Cox over a delicate guitar hook. It’s that infectious, heavenly plucking of strings slowly evolving into electronic bliss about halfway through the track that sequentially carries the musical flow just south of vacating Earth’s atmosphere—right where it’s supposed to be. Mike LeChevallier
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Wavves, “I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl.” Wavves has been drafted to serve as the primary composer for the first season of MTV’s new non-reality series I Just Want My Pants Back, an adaptation of David J. Rosen’s slacker-worshiping, pop-culture-reference-spewing novel of the same name. One aspect that sets Nathan Williams’s stoner-shoreline indie-rock project apart from its contemporaries is that the element of comedy is constantly a key player in the band’s music, and being that I Just Want My Pants Back is a slice-of-life story about the everyday fumbles that accompany one-night stands and the like, Wavves’s soundtrack rightly contains its fair share of laugh-out-loud moments. “I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl” (which will also appear on the band’s upcoming Life Sux EP) is a genuine romp of a song that illustrates some serious maturation in Williams as a singer-songwriter (the track’s best moment is when he casually transitions from “I wanna meet Dave Grohl” to “I wanna be Dave Grohl”). The production is cleaner and fuller than on the band’s King of the Beach, pulsating guitars and percussion dancing around doggedly behind Williams’s ever-tongue-in-cheek vocals. ML
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