On Purity Garrett dives into angry surreality. It’s a record which grasps the disorientation that comes from mania and extreme emotion, how the external world warps your mood. The album is a response to Garrett finding a neighbour’s dead body, and how he processed that trauma while also confronting his own suicidal ideation. It’s a bleak record, but it creates lucidity from the light it shines into these dark crevices. It’s also oddly vital, as if Garrett is trapping the vibrancy of life hidden in despair.
From the fierce opener of ‘Alive’, Purity moves through fragmented songs, unnerving background noise and cathartically mangled riffing. On ‘Tearful Life’, an acoustic ballad gets interrupted by feral glossolalia. ‘Suck’ is like Primus with the bass virtuosity muted and the sense of a Lynchian circus ratcheted up. ‘Cost Of Living’ is death metal taken to cartoonish extremes, as though Garrett is desperately trying to treat crippling ambivalence with melodramatic bombast. ‘Want To Know’ seems like it’s melting in the mid-section. At the album’s gentlest, it swerves into ASMR territory. But Garrett inverts a fixation on creating a frisson in background sound to find verdant emptiness in the details. When he drawls, “Singing through a sacred horn” on ‘Spirit Of Mind’, he sounds like he’s reached the end of his tether – as though a million new age wellness fads have failed to bring enlightenment or heightened sensation.
Where Garrett’s previous recordings have had a homemade sheen, Purity rings with a stadium metal sparkle. But where some artists might apply higher-fidelity production to gloss over their rough edges, Garrett boldly draws attention to them, the studio acting as a megaphone rather than a filter. Weirdness shines through with pristine clarity, creating an unlikely, bamboozling middle ground between Korn and The Shadow Ring.
Purity foregrounds ugly feelings. It captures emotional dissonance, the discombobulation of being miserable when everything around you seems positive. Feeling sour on a sunny day. That might sound nihilistic, maybe even misanthropic, but Purity’s strength comes from the attempt to find relief through sharing these dank moods. Diving into the frantic instability of precarious headspace, Garrett wrestles with the sharp edges of life rather than succumb to numbness. It’s affirming to hear, despite the darkness.
