"Guy Got Kilt"... How Columboid and I Became One.

I've always been one to strongly insist that any album, of any content, is significant if it lends itself to a new personal experience for an individual - or fosters one they may have already had at some time in their lives.  You think about albums that are considered "the best of all time" or simply "the best" by a given artist, and a few things come to mind: (1) If they are heralded as "best of all time", then they were likely best selling records because (a) they appealed to a lot of people on the same level (which is no small task), and/or (b) they were just really well marketed (i.e., any fucking album by the goddamn Beatles). (2) they made an impression on the jadedly unimpressionable (critics) who represent a select fraction of the population that wield the ability to propel them into stardom, or they made a tremendous widespread impact on a larger amount of people who were equally, though maybe less articulately, amazed at what they'd done (think Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot... in both scenarios, come to think of it).  In either case, music is never anything to anyone until it does something for someone. Arguably then, everything ever released meets that criteria for someone; but the true decider of the sides is just how many people were touched.  It's like the analogy that one person praising any single given entity is an unbalanced weirdo... but a bunch of people doing it gives that thing validity and makes the thing Holy - and therefore and therein, all accolades applied to said entity become Gospel.

Purity Ring, Another Latter Day 4AD Impurity

Still trying to build a 2.0 version of the reputation they earned in the mid 80s through mid 90s for nurturing unique and often counter mainstream artists, 4AD records offers us this band - one of their newer acquisitions - Purity Ring.  Their debut release entitled Shrines.

The packaging has all the finesse and intrigue that would normally suggest the creative integrity of a bonfide 4AD act, but that's kind of the one thing the label decided to hold onto when they began the process of surgically altering their once starving artist meets designer brand aesthetic. And it's blatantly obvious that when they signed Purity Ring, someone if not everyone, at the flailing label, had their fingers crossed that this band would be a harbinger for 4AD's reclamation of former glory.