Overmono released the “Pulse Runner” single back in November, a full-thrust late-addition for year-end consideration and presumably an advance on the Welsh duo’s forthcoming year. It opened with the synth equivalent of a motorcycle rev, a little “look at me” before rifling into the distance. Sleek, curve-hugging, and full of desire but also vulnerable, it was also fairly mainstream. Overmono’s reputation among club-heads had been cemented by the time of 2023’s Good Lies and now this, apparently, was a go at something bigger.
Pure Devotion does not leap for the brass ring but resembles something more like an Instagram pic of the arrivals gate at Iceland’s Keflavik airport. Brothers Tom and Ed Russell decided not to jump upwards – they’ve gone outward, abroad. The title is pulled from the pair’s recent live shows and their demonstrated commitment to keeping their relationship with their audience alive. Pure Devotion the album doesn’t look down on accessibility or directness; it actually gives lie to the assumption that everything up in the DJ booth is pre-programmed and hunky dory.
Iceland therefore becomes an unwitting metaphor as the place where much of the album came about. The land of Björk and volcanoes is naturally more than just that. Breathtaking landscapes and austere modernity collide in the art-collage World Series: like the Joshua Tree forest in California, its landscape rarely lingers and favours abrupt change. Words that are literally dozens of letters in length clutter road signs. Sheep comically appear in the unlikelist positions, as if attached by Velcro. The Russells might yet take the leap, but first they’d like to shuffle the decks.
The motorcycle-rev tone from “Pulse Runner” returns on opener “Lockup”, but the sample has been broadened to sound like a stylus skipping at the end of a warped Side A or when intoxicants send a room into a spin. Title aside, “Lockup” exults in disorder and its EQ is mischievously imbalanced. Like their familiar doberman visuals, Overmono’s penchant for leftfield vocal snippets returns. This time the beat is built around “What A Waste” from late-70s Birmingham post-punks Fast Relief. A legacy of “Yakety Yak”, its and the album’s manifesto say “we’re not doing it your way”.
“Knight In Shining Prada” introduces the rarest of Overmono elements: an original vocal. Ed told The Fader in 2023: “Someone else might’ve expressed an emotion in a very confident manner that we wouldn’t have felt as comfortable doing.” The workaround was simple: have poet John Joseph Holt record it himself. Imperious, late-60s synth tones gradually give way to a techno build up for his exhortations, “Lead the way as you always have and we will come to you”!
The fresh-vocal appears to be freeing in other ways on Pure Devotion. The duo used two snippets from little-known Chattanooga-raised singer Kindora in the past and – true to their spirit-of-the-community ideals – have repaid the Tennessean with two features here. Unsurprisingly, the tracks featuring Kindora link immediately back in time and provide a baseline for the experiments that proliferate around them. The tracks between her appearances exploit her absence by flinging the album from underwater, early-80s Prince R&B (“Barum”) to SZA (“Mialon”) to stiff, robotic pulses that tie together the tones that reach back to 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. “Adre” could be mistaken for the digital saxophone manipulations of Colin Stetson.
It’s very possible that Overmono see Pure Devotion as a shot at immortality and the narrative in this review is completely false. “Slow Motion” and “Even Angels Ghost” rank among their strongest material while carrying what have become the brothers’ trademarks. An album of entirely “Pulse Runner” clones could have done more damage than good. Yet the sense remains that reserves exist, that these songs of Devotion are the end of the beginning.
