Album review
Clementine Valentine, the sister duo formerly known as Purple Pilgrims, have unveiled a new song, ‘The Rope’. Accompanied by a video directed by Auckland-based duo PICTVRE (Veronica Crockford-Pound and Joseph Griffen), it’s set to appear on their upcoming album The Coin That Broke the Fountain Floor, which is out August 25 via Flying Nun Records and includes lead single ‘Time and Tide’. Check out both tracks below.
“‘The Rope’ acts as a motif to connect us to our ancestors – we wanted it to feel as though it could be both ancient and of now,” the sisters explained in a statement, continuing:
A feeling we call ‘ancient futurism’ something we’ve been chasing in our songs for years now. We were reaching for a feeling simultaneously sinister and comforting as, to us, so many ancient songs are.
We’ve always listened to a lot of new music, but the core of our creative expression has always come directly from our deep familial folk music traditions. This is something that has not always been easily identifiable perhaps, due to the fact that we’ve never been interested in making ‘folk revival music’ – there’s no finger picking on any of our family records. The folk element in our songs is on a DNA level, stretching back beyond the 1960s wave that folk music is commonly associated with.
Having felt for a long time that pop, and (more importantly to us) lo-fi or bedroom produced music, to now be the true music of the people (accessible to all) – we finally decided we wanted to use more acoustic and ‘traditional’ instrumentation to express this feeling of modernising relics.
Although our personal tradition of using an excess of synthesizers is still very much present all over this album, ‘The Rope’ is very stripped back for us and tells the story of our family music in a way we never have before.
