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498 Posted By: Keith Bruce, The Glasgow Herald on 14 Nov 2011 |
From their Perthshire fastness, John Wills and Pinkie Maclure emerge blinking into the starlight of contemporary electronica with an album that is sometimes lush and sometimes scarily gothic. The soundscapes Wills has crafted here are the work of a musician as inventive with keyboard sounds old and new as he is on the guitar and drums he has played in previous chapters of his career. Like a brooding distant cousin of Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory, he has fashioned the perfect backdrop for his foil, the distinctive voice of Maclure, who can recall PJ Harvey one minute and the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser the next. “It only takes a song of lost love to get you teary-eyed,” she sings in Your Arms, Your Doors, but her lyrics are for the most part delightfully playful, full of surprising allusions and turns of phrase. Some have drawn comparisons with Isobel Campbell’s excursions with Mark Lanegan, but Pumajaw’s music is altogether darker and sexier. Less poppy than Goldfrapp, it is equally careless of the fashions of the time.
Keith Bruce
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491 Posted By: Sharon O'Connell, Uncut Magazine on 01 Nov 2011 |
Has the experimental Perthshire pair’s time finally come?
Former Loop and Hair & Skin Trading Company guitarist/drummer John Wills and the strikingly voiced Pinkie Maclure have been ploughing an idiosyncratic electronic rock/cabaret jazz/exotica furrow for more than a decade without ever troubling the charts, but their latest record chimes surprisingly well with the times. Artful drama and an avant garde sensuousness still define them, but “Mask” is a glimpse of a new identatity. Here, a flickering techno pulse and swirling electronics give way to an insistant groove, hooky synths and Maclure’s bluesy caw. Pumajw could never have planned it, but fans of Florence and The Machine may well be swayed.
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