I discovered Pristine sometime in 2016. When browsing music videos on YouTube they showed up out of nowhere, a related artist to something long since forgotten, and they blew me away.
Imagine my surprise when I went into full-on research mode found that they were Norwegian!
2017 saw the release of their fourth album Ninja and I have been devouring it. This is an album that has been hard to put down at times.
Pristine hails from Tromsø, a city located almost at the very northernmost of Norway, way above the Polar Circle. Never has a band so relatively close to the North Pole sounded so authentically US Southern Delta!
They were founded in 2006 and won the Nordic blues championship and Union Blues Cup in 2010. This led to them travelling to Memphis (USA) in 2012 to participate in the International Blues Challenge. During the competition they were given the nickname “The Arctic Blues Band” and quickly became a favourite with the audiences, even winning over their competitors with their friendly demeanour and supportive approach. Pristine made it all the way to the semi finals of the competition as the first Norwegian band ever, and that’s when they decided to go professional. Footage from the competition can be found on YouTube.
Stylistically Pristine belong somewhere between 1970s blues rock, classic hard rock, and even a touch of southern rock. A much better description: they are high energy and kick butt.
You Are the One was the first single and an excellent introduction to the band and album.
While the whole band deserve kudos, female lead vocalist Heidi Solheim still deserve some highlighting as the person who sold the band to me (and surely many others). Her voice is just amazing. It is so expressive – it wails, it swaggers, and it is all over the register. She can sound raw, soulful, vulnerable, powerful, seductive and anything in between. This is extremely suitable for the genre they find themselves in – especially on the more bluesy songs, her voice really lifts the emotional punch of those songs into the stratosphere. To have a voice of that calibre in the band is the be-all end-all of bands in this genre, as is also having a band underneath that voice that can give the voice a musical foil to work with. This is Pristine in a nutshell.
Ninja is still growing on me and may not even be my favourite album by Pristine (yet!), which is saying something.
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