Pure X

Crawling Up The Stairs

Acephale

Street: 05.14

Pure X = Sebadoh + Woods + Pity Sex

Where Crawling up the Stairs doesn’t confront immediately with a sense of deep self-loathing, it seethes. Pure X is disarming in the way Nate Grace and Jesse Jenkin’s songs belie their distressed core by being quite pretty and non-confrontational. The cracks appear in the placid, spacey lo-fi rock tunes when Grace’s voice is unadorned by effects and laid bare in some of the most painfully confessional and moving lyrics in recent memory. This emotionally-raw screaming in non-hardcore bands would have gotten some snarky “emo” remarks a few years ago, but fuck it, Grace’s howl on “How Did you Find Me” is emotional––like in that timeless, existentially crushing sense of the word. Although a bit uneven and unfocused, Crawling up the Stairs contains moments of honesty difficult to find in a lot of today’s music. –Ryan Hall