Pumajaw: Demonmeowmeow (CD on Bedevil Records)

Band: Pumajaw
Label: Bedevil Records
Title: Demonmeowmeow

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Band:Pumajaw
Title:Demonmeowmeow
Reviewed By:Maarten Schiethart
Date Published:15/10/2011

Label:Bedevil Records
Format:CD
Release Year:2011
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Mood over music only works with a compelling voice backed by quality drone repetition. Half of Pumajaw is ex-Loop moody boy John Wills, an experienced man of the dark. His better half in Pumajaw is Pinkie Maclure whose timbre vaguely recalls Marlène Dietrich. At eight tracks and 52 minutes, 'Demonmeowmeow' tends to go on a bit.

Track two, 'In the Outlands', shows a great amount of imagination in its music and vocal grace. The thin line Pumajaw walks already show on the nausea of the next track, 'Tallulah'.

'The Safe Inside' returns to the earlier sound of Pumajaw with a slice of twang and bite but evolves into a hypnotic spiral. This sensuality turns rather socio-political on 'Chinny-Chin-Chin' and is beautifully haunting. With a few tracks I couldn't help thinking it was a Soft Cell vinyl single played at 33 rpm. Then again the formula works well on the closing esoteric track 'Tumbledown'. A modest album with question marks instead of exclamation marks.

Track Listing:

01) The Mazy Laws
02) In The Outlands
03) Tallulah
04) The Safe Inside
05) Mask
06) Chinny-Chin-Chin
07) Your Arms Your Doors
08) Tumbledown

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20201 Posted By: Keith Bruce (The Glasgow Herald)

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

20183 Posted By: Sharon O'Connell (Uncut Magazine)

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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Odd combination of the beautiful and the unlistenable on latest album from Scottish-based electronic duo, Pumajaw

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