Belong – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
My Terrible Friend – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
The first record from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart was a fairly standard set of New Wave/Sarah Records tunes. Good, certainly, but nothing particularly surprising. Since then, they apparently started listening to their old Smashing Pumpkins records and were struck by a bolt of inspiration. It doesn’t really seem like it should work, but the addition of Siamese Dream-era waves of guitar noise has transformed this very fun band into something irresistible. Belong is one of the very best records this year – in addition to being one of the best records of the 90s, fifteen years too late.
The opening title track announces their presence with a bang. Within the first few seconds the guitars take off and spectral images of the old video for “Today” (you know, the one with the ice cream truck) start to form in your mind. Then, you get the soft half of the soft/loud dynamic, which has the sort of bouncy melodies you’d expect from the band. All of which only makes the return of the guitars with the chorus all the more forceful. In fact, the moment at 1:14 might be my favorite couple seconds of music this year.
However, even with the new gauzy textures, the heart of the band remains in great indie pop music. The twee spirit remains strong in a series of songs about feelings and love and the like (‘Anne With an E’ is a reference to Anne of Green Gables, for example). It is not a record for analyzing the lyrics book in search of some deep meaning. Divorced from the context of the performance, it’s all pretty trite. But, in a way, that’s precisely what makes the record so good. The sheer naïveté, the excitement and energy, the willingness to sound foolish. You have to give yourself up to it, accept the internal logic, and you’ll find the deeper truth: the incredible thing about love is the way it can make the banal feel like magic.
For a perfect example, see ‘Only in Dreams.’ If you take a critical eye, you might notice that the melodic progression is pretty simplistic. And the lyrics are even more clichéd. But with the right perspective, the big chorus (‘even in dreams, I could not betray you’) obtains a sort of transcendence.
For something slightly closer to the carefree/sunshine sound of the first record, there’s ‘My Terrible Friend’ which has boundless energy and bounces along at about a hundred miles an hour.
The end of the record is a little weak, but such minor missteps can easily be forgiven. Few albums this year will provide even a tenth as much joy as this one.