You're All My Sisters.




The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – This Love is Fucking Right

I’ve been meaning to write a post reviewing the Pains Of Being Pure At Heart album for AGES. Seems like the kind of thing I should really have an opinion on, what with them being the real from-the-underground-into-the-stratosphere band of the moment, playing within a style & scene I broadly speaking enjoy. But in fact I’ve been meaning to get around writing about them for so long that the essence of what I initially wanted to say about them has changed several times over.

Seeing them play for the first time, I was kinda suspicious – what was with these young, impeccably turned out, slightly-too-perfectly-hewn Brooklyners, with their mighty, streamlined noise-pop sound, with their spare Fender Jaguars, their pedalboards for christ’s sake, ripping their aesthetic wholesale from the kind of faintly desperate, lovelorn racket trademarked by ugly, misfit British kids at the dawn of the ‘80s? What was with this guy’s weedy, reedy singing voice, being bullied by all the other instrument like he’s mimicking the kind of ‘bad’ voice that Dan Treacy and the guy from The Razorcuts used to sing in because those were the only voices they *had*, deliberately adopting it for the purposes of retrospective scene identification?

They were an enjoyable band on stage, no doubt; really loud, with all the right bits in the right places. But I found it odd how they seemed to have immediately assumed deity status amongst the indie-pop cognoscenti before their first album was even on the shelves, with practically every one of their available songs being DJed in turn to rapturous response on every conceivable occasion. The kind of natural GROUNDSWELL that major label pluggers probably do not even dare to dream of these days. And I mean, they’re pretty, and they do all the stuff that’s currently indie-trendy, and they don’t even sound weird, man! Squint your ears a bit in the right/wrong direction and they could even sound a bit like The Smashing Pumpkins, without that whining bald guy getting in the way. These guys could be BIG.

Needless to say, it was during one of my periodic retreats to the Welsh hills that the tables turned, when I downloaded a leak of The Pains album on a whim and stuck in my earphones to go for a nice long walk. BOY, is it an album. Outside the city, far from any music scene backbiting, my above reservations started to seem like the petty, snidey, insular bitching they undoubtedly are. Fuck ‘indie-pop’; what I was listening to as I barrelled down Welsh country lanes was rock n’ roll the way the Velvets rewired it forty years ago: the drummer plays simple stuff real enthusiastic, the organist holds down big, single chords and lets them ring, the bass doubles back on itself in sweet melodic patterns, and the guitars go FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF, covering everything like a happy rainstorm. The recording is huge, with everything amped up, filed down and maximised to digital-age, killer proportions, the chord changes are lovely, the songs are heartfelt and the lyrics are memorable and smart. What’s not to love?

My friend and I spoke briefly to the guy from The Pains at one of their gigs, and he seems like a really sweet, modest sort of fellow. I’m sure his band didn’t MEAN to make a Battle-Album. I think they’re just careful, ambitious, and very good at what they do. But nonetheless, they have made a Battle-Album. In one fell swoop, they manage to out-twee the neo-indiepoppers, to out-Superchunk the neo-indie rockers, and even to out-‘Gaze the neo-shoegazers on the longer tracks, with their motorik rhythmic drive and luxurious layered distortion. Within their designated sphere, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are kings of the castle. If you’re into any of this kinda stuff, they are henceforth the band to beat.

Ok, so they’re good. We are PRO- them. That’s terrific, but so what? Lots of people are *good*, but I didn’t think this album really had it in it to properly move me or anything, with all my strange, unguessable musical moodswings. So, phase # 3 was instigated by “This Love Is Fucking Right”.

Jesus christ. I could carry on about this band and their place in the current scheme of things until I’m blue in the face, but this here? THIS is a fucking song.

This is their ‘September Gurls’. I’m not saying it’s that good (nothing is), but…

Like ‘September Gurls’, you’d be hard pressed to catch more than more than a few fragments of the lyrics on a first listen, and they perhaps don’t seem to add up to anything terribly coherent, but you’d be a fucking moron if you didn’t instantly grasp the totality of what this song’s, y’know, ABOUT. Hint: it’s not about incest. It’s all in the way half-heard phrases, ghosts of what was originally on the lyric sheet, combine with the power of the music to torpedo into whatever the hell place your emotional impulses come from, to make new shapes, like fireworks and stuff, to get the point across.

Also like ‘September Gurls’, this song has a perfectly positioned lead guitar overdub that just cleaves the sky in two, saying more in ten seconds than ten minutes of huffy-puffy folky storytelling could.

And like ‘September Gurls’, this song is a gateway drug, a key to the rest of the album, leading you to reassess the merits of ‘Young Adult Friction’, of ‘Come Saturday’ and ‘Stay Alive’ (and today I think the Vaselines-y 'Hey Paul' is by far my favourite), subsequently finding them all just as powerfully realised as the key-song, pieces of a puzzle that threatens to spell out Classic Album, whether you like it or not. Cos after a while, if you listen to it loud enough, the whole of this Pains album will smash your face and rip your heart at least half as thoroughly as the Big Star ones did. I recommend listening to it with the bass up a lot, the treble down a bit.

Most of all though, most importantly, and UNLIKE ‘September Gurls’, (which found it’s initial audience largely among lonely record geeks and ‘70s fanzine scribes), ‘This Love Is Fucking Right’ just makes me think of the dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of people who are going to have this song, and the other Pains songs, and whatever joyous, confusing, bittersweet, frightening, unreal memories they each surgically attach to them, sewn into their recollections of this summer, or last summer, last winter, tomorrow or right now, or at a retro night in 2030, stuck to them forever as they blast from sound systems yet unknown, making life like a movie in the midst of heat haze and sunsets and warmth and streets and fields, fuel to human feeling and hope and folly and momentary love frozen forever.

Man, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart are fucking RIGHT! And so am I, and so are you, and love is always right.

Labels: album reviews, song reviews, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, WOW BIG STAR COMPARISONS