Boothroyd - Pure Country (2018)

Pure Country is the uncannily incisive début LP from Peter Boothroyd, a highly touted UK composer who’s built a unique rep around his Idle Hours 12” for Tri Angle along with curveball grime productions for Maxsta, Maniac and Trim.

By many measures, a record with this many sunset EDM guitar licks and Roseanne-style mouth organ vamps is definitely a guilty pleasure, but what he’s doing with the aspirational commercial memes of modern day Britain and America is akin to James Ferraro on his classic Far Side Virtual, but, for us, with a p1ss-funny British grasp of sarcasm/sincerity

It takes a special kinda artist who can genuinely absorb and reflect the uncanniness of the contemporary climate, and for us right now that’s Boothroyd. Under a wickedly polysemous title that we could take myriad ways, he maps the naughtiest country tropes to the kind of R&B-trance-EDM backdrops often used to try and sell you shite, basically attempting to manipulate your emotions in the context of bad TV or YouTube adverts trying to lure you in under 5 seconds. The results have us genuinely LOL-ing, but also marvelling at the way he riffs on that banality of affect, and ultimately finds something worthwhile within it.

In effect, Pure Country’s EDM subversion is antithesis to IDM in the same way V/Vm was in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, but Boothroyd uses its language of loaded gestures in a subtler way, oscillating Tourist board-montage memes in Pure Country with hilarious Shameless-soundtrack style mouth organ vamps in Blue, and saltier licks of soft trance on Rinsed, while a pinched riff on his Mare Street Dick Head cut here as Dry gives a quick poker face reset that slips into a smirk with the Springsteen-style solo on Jeep, and the most loved-up smize on the final run of Sunset Ibiza, Gap and Balearic Horse, which are the sort of tunes you’d imagine Arthur Russell to write if he were coming thru now.