PURE

'Pure' is the eighth studio album by British progressive rock/metal band Pendragon. After Pendragon's shift to a harder rocking style on the previous release 'Believe', Pendragon expands upon that shift in sound and extends the metal leanings.

Like the previous album, there is a balance between heavy metal/rock songs and slower calm songs. The album begins with the heavy 14-minute 'Indigo', which soon blasts you with heavy riffing. The song has a nice contrast between the heavy metal riffing and slower passages, the transitions coming at the perfect times. At the bridge Peter Gee plays a great bassline over Clive Nolan's atmospheric keyboards, with Nick Barrett's heavy riffing soon coming in. The song ends with a great soaring guitar solo. One of my favorites on the album is 'Comatose I: View from the Seashore', which begins very slow and melancholy with heavy riffing coming in about 3-minutes through. My other favorite is the shorter song 'The Freak Show'. It immediately begins with heavy crunching guitar and Nolan soon gives us more atmospheric keyboards. I also really like the lyrics for this song.

Like with the previous album, Barrett's vocals fit this sound much better then Pendragon's older style. The way the slower and calmer parts in this new style are played, makes his voice sound very passionate. Instead of grandiose sometimes really annoying synth, it is overall much more guitar led with more acoustics then synth.

My only problem with this album, are the all slow songs. The longer songs that have various tempos are great, but I feel like the songs that are just slow are pretty weak. They seem to drag on and on, especially the 8-minute long final song 'It's Only Me'.

Overall, even though it has it's flaws it's still a great addition to any progressive metal/rock collection and I recommend it.

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