Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - Pop for the pure of heart

The brief trajectory of New York quartet The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart can be seen as paradigmatic of how the undying seed of pop periodically takes root again, reaching levels of popularity that are far from negligible, regardless of intellectualism, avant-gardism, and even those phenomena cooked up in the stale air of some marketing office.

The band's story - charming name aside - begins like that of many others destined to remain the preserve of a handful of incurable indie-pop devotees. It's 2007 when a self-produced five-track EP starts circulating in the underground of enthusiasts, driven by the wild opening track "This Love Is Fucking Right!", a twee concentrate of sugar, early-90s British guitars and (dis)enchanted post-adolescent spontaneity.

The EP catches the attention of a small but significant institution in the field, the praiseworthy Florida label Cloudberry, which reissues three of those tracks on a 3" format. It's the start of the band's lightning-fast rise, as they soon land on Slumberland, quickly churning out a series of killer tracks, first on the split with Summer Cats ("Come Saturday") and then with the 7"s Everything With You and Young Adult Friction.

The self-titled debut album is thus almost a formality, or in any case the direct consequence of the band's spirited verve, perfectly balanced between playful indie-twee-pop energy and a myriad of possible references (though never in a univocal way) to the England of a couple of decades earlier. In the mere thirty-four minutes of their self-titled full-length debut, the quartet led by singer-guitarist Kip Berman and the thick-haired, Asian-featured keyboardist Peggy Wang don't simply chase a musical formula, nor simply an aesthetic to adhere to.

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart do pay clear tribute to readily identifiable sounds and experiences, but they do so through two essential elements that easily help them avoid the risk of flattening into slavish emulation, always lurking around the corner in these cases: on one hand, the freshness in writing immediate, personal songs, and on the other, the ability to touch on multiple references, in balanced combinations that are constantly evolving.

With the constants of tight rhythms and the typically shoegaze split between underlying distortion and ethereal melodic sweetness remaining in place, across the album's ten tracks an extensive array of nuances unfolds seamlessly, ranging from the roots of Jesus & Mary Chain and Sarah Records to the Scotland of Pastels and Teenage Fanclub, passing through the more pop and dreamy components of My Bloody Valentine and, above all, Lush.

The effectiveness of the frequent vocal interplay, always light and elusive, thus pairs with thick electric swirls, creating melodies that easily lodge in the ear, helped along by the general conciseness of tracks that on more than one occasion ("The Tenure Itch", the incipit of "Stay Alive") seem to sketch out a kind of twee-pop toughened up by drum cadences or wrapped in a seductive blanket of feedback. The rhythms, however, are mostly urgent and at times take on dark-wave undertones, like those conjured by the deep bass of "Young Adult Friction", though always tempered by melody, the essential glue holding together the many variations the American band delivers with such ease. Notable indeed is the versatility shown in the shifts from shoegaze whirlwinds to a loping jingle jangle gait, from feverish electric cadences to soft pop lyricism.

The album – which would soon win over critics and audiences alike – was followed a few months later by the EP Higher Than The Stars, which includes five more tracks revealing an even broader and more disorienting range of "archaeological" interests than in the recent past. On the title track, keyboards begin to take over, balanced by a pronounced Smiths-like lyricism and still dotted with waves of feedback ("103") or ethereal twee inflections ("Falling Over").

Staying true to the vintage format of the single, in 2010 the band released two more: the delightful Say No To Love, which picks up and develops the themes and sound of the first record, and the carefree Heart In Your Heartbreak, which confirms a growing focus on the interplay between keyboards and guitars, always highly enjoyable but by now closer to the prevailing indie aesthetic than to the pure pop genuineness of their early days.

It's the prelude to their second, hugely anticipated album, Belong, which marks the quartet's step up to a more refined approach, with more careful production and mixing – handled respectively by Flood and Alan Moulder – but also a sweeter taste tailored to the palate of the midstream audience.

Not that the noise-pop cocktail with its eighties flavor, built on feedback and dreamy post-adolescent melodies, underwent any radical overhaul, yet a good number of the ten songs on Belong place greater emphasis on the role of the keyboards on one hand, while on the other showing a noticeable thickening of the guitar parts, now more often abrasive and clattering than languid and shimmering.

The album's incipit leans decidedly in that direction, pushing into the background the 80s-90s British echoes that countless comparisons had overused at the time of the debut; making up for that is the record's central section, which is also its most reflective, with the soft, Sarah-Records-style melancholy of the forlorn "Anne With An E" and the bright little keyboard lines, redolent of the poppier side of the Cure, that wrap "The Body" in a longing, desire-soaked embrace.

While it doesn't quite deliver true killer melodies, the purest pop still surfaces in the pairing of "Even In Dreams" and "My Terribile Friend" (among the best-written tracks here), while the closing stretch is left entirely to the remaining dreamy sheen of the languid feedback cascades of "Too Tough" and "Strange". In this part of the record, as well as in the aforementioned "Anne With An E", moods of grey British industrial suburbs resurface, along with images of young musicians with hair falling over their eyes, also conjured by the delicately dreamy tone of Kip Berman's vocals, which are clearly far better suited to these ethereal registers than to moments when the rhythms pick up and the guitars and keyboards get a bit too thunderous.

And, in all likelihood, it's precisely this excess of production polish – though perfectly suited to the prevailing taste of the moment – that represents the price the New York quartet had to pay in terms of expressive spontaneity, weighed down by the expectations indie trendsetters had placed on this second effort. Yet that's not necessarily a bad thing, at least given the sacred fire of pop and the quality of songwriting running through most of the tracks on Belong, which rightly confirm The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart as the tip of the iceberg of 2010s indie-pop-rock.

Kip Berman let quite a bit of time pass before returning to the scene with his own creation on the third album Days Of Abandon. When the details of the record were announced, it also became clear what the main reason for this long wait might have been: almost all the musicians who had made up the New York band's lineup had moved on to other things. The changes don't end with the new lineup – there are even more significant ones when it comes to the sound: quite simply, across all 10 songs, the distortion and reverb that once made it easy to link the band to touchstones like Sarah Records and C86 have completely vanished. In terms of melodic style, though, it's business as usual, and Berman's touch is instantly recognizable: in fact, if you applied the sound of the earlier records to these new compositions, they would fit right in.

One of this record's chief merits is that every song has its own identity, and the noble art of pure pop is handled with great stylistic consistency across the whole album, while still showing meaningful variation from one track to the next. Several songs are built on nonstop jangle with a keyboard underneath to soften things further, but the record has plenty more to offer: the opening "Art Smock" is a gentle, acoustic caress, with the female vocal taking a secondary role yet proving essential to the overall tenderness; "Coral And Gold" is another moment of calm, alternating between a quiet, stripped-down verse and a chorus where many more elements burst in; "Until The Sun Explodes" belongs to the sunnier, more upbeat majority of the record, but here the guitars are bigger and, for once, not quite so clean; "Life After Life" also features the female vocal but has a more elaborate sonic structure, with occasional horns; finally "The Asp In My Chest" closes things out with the same delicacy with which the record began, but with more elaborate arrangements in the vein of the previous track.

Berman's melodic inspiration is at its very best, and the way each song is crafted is so effective that it leaves the listener wanting to start the record over again, sometimes several times a day. The fact that The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart has turned into a project with such a fluid lineup around its leader makes any question about its future beside the point: as long as Berman is still able to write songs like these and find the right musicians to bring out the best in his melodies, every new release of his will always be welcome, whether under this name or another.

At the end of 2015, a year and a half after “Days Of Abandon”, the New Yorkers returned with a three-track EP, a Christmas cadeaux for the fans that adds little to the band's discography but does rescue from obscurity the previously unreleased Hell, a track rooted in unmistakably eighties-flavored indie-pop. Rounding out the EP are two covers that pair nicely with the band's most recent work: "Ballad Of The Band", originally by the English band Felt, leans toward the less gloomy side of the Cure, the "In Between Days" side, so to speak, while the dusted-off James track "Laid" is equally enjoyable, a kind of sedated "Twist And Shout". The result is an EP that's as charming as it is brief, likely a stopgap to hold the market's attention while awaiting the band's next release, one that here comes across as less visceral and more lighthearted than in the past.

In September 2017 came the fourth album, The Echo Of Pleasure. The project still revolves around Kip Berman, who nonetheless brought along a lineup very similar to that of the previous record. Stylistically, there's no shortage of the deliberate sonic imperfections that marked the first two albums, but neither is there any shortage of the pronounced polish and the musical and vocal harmonies that underpin the latest work. One thing's for sure: you can't accuse Berman and his bandmates of not taking risks, since this kind of combination could easily have ended up as a shapeless mess.

The record's main achievement, however, is precisely its ability to craft a unified, coherent sound despite the risk of clashing between such different elements. The integration between them can undoubtedly throw listeners off at first, producing an effect not unlike those sweet-and-sour dishes where both qualities are strongly present; but then, with repeated listens, it becomes clear that the pieces of the puzzle actually fit together organically and are cleverly assembled, making it easy to also appreciate other qualities of the record, such as its melodic quality and variety.

The former has never been in doubt when it comes to the Pains. The variety shows in the way the record moves from a measured, incisive "My Only" to a particularly dynamic "Anymore", with a stripped-down verse and soft guitar explosions that land exactly on cue in the chorus; from a driving "When I Dance With You", with keyboard riffs that make the whole thing especially compelling, to an airy title track with a less prominent rhythm that nonetheless knows how to burrow under the listener's skin; from "So True", the most arena-ready song the Pains have ever written, to "The Cure For Death", which keeps the pop attitude of the rest of the record but is rather introspective, carrying with it a thinly veiled bitterness.

Probably, in terms of absolute quality, the uncompromising pop of the previous record is still preferable, but here we have to applaud the audacity and the ability to find a balance starting from points that were hard to reconcile. This production and compositional evolution could open up a very wide range of possibilities for the Pains' future path, since from here they can really go in any direction and even decide to push things even further down the line.

On November 4, 2019, Kip Berman posted online the announcement of the band's split, stating: “The Pains were a defining moment in my life. I started the band shortly after moving to New York, and we recorded our first record right after my daughter was born […] From that point on I didn't feel like the same person anymore, and the music I was making reflected that too. But that's okay.”

Contributions by Stefano Bartolotta (“Days Of Abandon”, “The Echo Of Pleasure”) and Claudio Lancia (“Hell EP”)

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