One minute you are listening to Captain and Tennille crooning “Do It To Me One More Time” (only this time how about some foreplay?) and the next Pure Ground are locking their old style sequenced sonic weapons upon you in order to persuade you that all that is bleak can be a thing of wonder. No wonder why head hurts and I keep hearing voices that tell me black cats are the true masters of the universe.
Ramble on crazy man for Pure Ground – self-described as a human electronic duo from Los Angeles – are here to crush your skull with the kind of robotic rhythms that transcend the inevitable dancefloor origins in their search for darker, even spiritual, answers that will never see the dawn’s early light. “Giftgarten”, therefore, doesn’t make for an easy listen – nothing this bleakly industrial ever would – and yet there is something compelling in their abandonment of the antiquated concepts of decipherable lyrics and ear friendly melodies that makes this album more than just the product of two arthouse escapees on a story arc to becoming serial killer celebrities. It’s all there for your ears with the very Germanic “By the Grace of God” and the equally humourless “The Great Becoming” proving that inescapable logic is the product of the human rather than the computer.
So, should you find yourself hovering over the planet Scalos waiting for that opportunity to bring democracy through devastation with this album booming inside your headphones, you should remember that, in space, no one can hear you laugh. So push the button because, as history has so often demonstrated, love will keep us together…