Artist: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Album: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Someone once said that there was nothing new under the sun. This hypothetical someone might or might not have been a nineties indie rock enthusiast. That someone may or may not have also been listening to The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s self-titled album. The Pains of Being Pure Heart takes all the elements of some of the greatest underground rock bands from the previous decade—Belle & Sebastian, My Bloody Valentine, Jesus & Mary Chain, etc.—and craft an album so blatantly unoriginal that it just so happens to be remarkably fresh and exciting.

When My Bloody Valentine released Loveless, their magnum opus, they put one of the most original and most annoying musical genres ever on the map: shoegaze. For the uninitiated, shoegaze as a genre refers to the excessive use of a guitar’s tremolo bar guitar, heavily-sampled drum loops, and vocals that are so low in the mix that they fade somewhere into the background. Unfortunately, shoegaze has resurfaced somewhat into a new, even more horrid musical form known as ‘noise-pop’. For reference of this, go and listen to No Age and Crystal Stilts.

Needless to say, shoegaze can be used for good as it is on The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s self-titled debut. What My Bloody Valentine lacked most of the time—that pop sensibility, the ability to buoyantly transcend the obscurity of the noise—PoBPaH have flawlessly incorporated it into their sound to create a fuzzed-out jubilation that also manages to transcend its influences.

Most of the pop on the album comes from the dual male-female vocals of bassist Alex Naidus and keyboardist Peggy Wang-East. On the quirky “Young Adult Friction”, PoBPaH take a cue from Belle & Sebastian and establish less of a harmonizing relationship between vocalists and more of a dynamic point-counterpoint melody. With this style, they are able to create hooks that manage to pierce the fuzz

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is an incredibly blissful album, allowing its listeners to be transported back to the good old days of naïveté and unadulterated youth. Sings Naidus on “Teenager in Love”: “And if you made a stand/I’d stand with you until the end/But you don’t need a friend/When you’re a teenager in love with Christ and heroin.” Aptly named, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart represent exactly what their name implies: that being a kid is hard to do, but growing up is even harder. They celebrate youth in much the same fashion as MGMT did last year on their hit song “Time to Pretend”.

The album is hardly subtle in telling what its intentions or influences are. “Contender”, the album’s opener, begins with a blast of guitar feedback that leads right into a sugary, drum-less pop song that is no less immediate than the pounding drums and vibrant major chords of the subsequent track “Come Saturday”. To bookend the album, “Gentle Sons” ends with an epic two minutes of primitive drums and screeching reverb-drenched feedback.

On their debut full-length, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart channel their influences in such a derivative way that they are almost celebrating them. Instead of trying to conceal those derivations, they amplify them. It’s like they know what they’re doing is unoriginal and that revelation is precisely what makes The Pains of Being Pure at Heart so original. B+