Purson: The Circle And The Blue Door

Tales of psychedelic Goths.

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Sometimes you can go forwards by moving backwards. Purson have settled on the early 70s for the building blocks of their psychedelic Gothic tales – big, bass-driven riffs, swirling Mellotrons and flanged guitars.

With Rosalie Cunningham’s voice the driving force, Purson come across somewhere between Renaissance and All About Eve, albeit with a heavier touch. Despite the title this is not a concept album, although there are certainly musical and lyrical threads running through it.

After the acoustic, mood-setting Wake Up Sleepy Head, the songs vary between the forceful, claustrophobic Spiderwood Farm and Leaning On A Bear, and the pastoral, bucolic Sailor Wife’s Lament and Tempest And The Tide. It all ends up back in the nursery with the dreamy Rocking Horse before the enigmatic, Bowie-like Tragic Catastrophe brings the evocative adventure to a close.

Hugh Fielder

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.