Music Review: The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, S/T (Slumberland)
Rating: 83
An alternative to the alternative raged on the East Coast and in the U.K. in the early ’90s while the zeitgeist was trained on Seattle, with bands such as Velocity Girl and the Field Mice taking a more innocent, less jaded approach in both music and lyrics. Brooklyn’s The Pains of Being Pure at Heart sounds like the next generation of these bands, and its self-titled debut is pure, noisy sweetness for fuzz-pop fans.
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart often wallows in woozy arrangements — a drum-free wall of distortion dominates the opening track, “Contender,” and on “Come Saturday,” the band plays with atonal pitch shifting reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine’s “Isn’t Anything.” But the group can also forego the big noise entirely on jangly confections such as “Stay Alive” and the perfect-pop single “Everything With You,” where the dreamy vocals of Kip Berman and Peggy Wang reign supreme.
All this reverence for alt-pop joys from a generation ago is by design — the disc is even mixed by former Velocity Girl leader Archie Moore and resides on that band’s old label, Slumberland, so there is no mistaking the group’s intent. But this is clearly a case where a great sound needed to be revived, and whether The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is bouncing along in a reverie (“A Teenager in Love”) or cloaking itself in a drone (the closing “Gentle Sons”) it all sounds timeless now.
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