Live Review: Purity Ring

The hip hop playing over the speakers finally fades after a few false calls. The Corner's red velvet curtains draw back to reveal a stage decked out with textured, paper mache-looking cocoons and a table-like object that holds technical equipment as well as a spread of diamond-shaped lanterns on stems, which act as stand-in synth keys. Purity Ring producer Corin Roddick made the lantern contraption himself – he calls it 'The Instrument'. The opening chords to Amenamy get sweaty, sticky bodies moving immediately, and as singer Megan James' saccharine voice sings the first words, “somberly, somberly”, Roddick hits the lanterns with sticks, which respond by flashing pink, green, yellow, blue; the cocoons light up the dark in time with the music, too.

Roddick – a master behind his creation – cuts and chops the tracks and James' vocals, while she saunters and sways, unsmiling in her long black dress. She's at her best when she's most theatrical, staring intensely into the audience while holding a glowing lantern, casting a halo around her hair. During the minimal and eerie Cartographist, she bangs on a large drum, which bursts into bright yellow light. Together the duo manage to take the dark, fantastical world they created on their album Shrines and repurpose it for a live setting; it might be the humidity but the crowd is easily and happily swept up in the audiovisual display.

Small missteps – such as a flat note sung here, and a slightly out-of-time hit of the drum there – shatter the fantasy momentarily, but before long we're pulled back in by seamless transitions between songs and live layering of sounds (the intro built up suspensefully on Ungirthed, the added whirrs on Obedear). There's minimal banter, with James speaking only to thank us. A cover of Soulja Boy's club banger Grammy and its subtle Auto-Tune is a refreshing change of pace, before a snippet of a cappella from James begins a trippy, loop-heavy version of Shuck, with Roddick playing thick synth sounds off an iPhone. It leads into closer Fineshrine and the crowd shouts “Get a little closer, let it fold”, palms facing the ceiling, enraptured, almost cult-like. There's no encore because once they've left the stage, that's the end of the illusion.