Purely Awful
Pure (formerly Matrix)
Tremont Street (across from the Wang)
Boston, MA

I hadn't been so excited about a club opening in a long time. Saturday was the grand opening of Pure - an all house, all dance club that would be unique in Boston. For too long dance clubs have all reverted to playing too much hip/hop and bad top 40 music, and dance music has been forgotten. While I don't mind gettin' my groove on to the latest music, I truly miss dance music that wasn't all about grinding and humping on the dance floor. Pure promised to deliver...

The night started off all right. Despite the fact that the place was quiet, girls were dancing and the drinks were flowing. The space looks exactly like the matrix did - almost. With 6 weeks of renovations, you would think that the club would have looked substantially different. I guess what six weeks gets you these days are some white sheets hung all over the room and a few huge LCD screens that have digital fish swim across them. All in all, the club never escapes the same trapping as Matrix: somehow you can tell the club is in the basement of the Roxy.

In the beginning, the music was fun - a mix of the BPM (XM radio for those who don't know) play list and some progressive house tracks, veering mainly on the vocal side of things. People started to dance and soon enough, as the clubbed filled closer to midnight, the dance floor started to fill up. All to soon the DJ switched gears and the vocals were gone, as were the people from the dance floor. Then the impossible happened, or so I thought. In what seemed like a response to he empty dance floor, the DJ kicked in a high energy version of Bette Davis Eyes that got the crowd up and off those new IKEA couches and jumping! DJ's today are so full of themselves that they would rather play what they wanted to a vacant dance floor then play to the crowd. The next cut was another nonvocal house track and the dance floor emptied.

My companion went up to the DJ and begged for the new Madonna song or a classic anthem from Kristine W. The DJ's reply was, "I don't play that S*&^!" Well hey Mr. DJ, no one liked the sh^% you were spinning! We waited another 15 minutes and left to go to the Apollo in Chinatown. Halfway through our 1am meal, I remembered that I hadn't closed my tab at Pure. I went back to the clb, now about 1:15 (a time when a club should be pulsating with music and dancing) and found a nearly empty dance floor with people swaying because they were drunk, not because they liked the music.

When I closed the tab, the bartender gave me an understanding look as if to say "Tonight sucked, didn't it?" My tab was only 40 dollars, so he obviously took pity on me and yet another sign that even the staff thought the night fizzled.

Bottom Line: Pure is nothing to look at. So unless the music changes and the DJ learns to work his crowd, I wouldn't go back. That said, I would like to go back in a month or so and give it one more chance. The club's heart is in the right place.....