Send "The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Avclub |
 More than just a mouthful, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart’s name is also as sweetly accurate an aesthetic statement as they come. The Brooklyn group is blissfully devout to its doe-eyed influences—high-grade Scottish twee, the jingle-jangle wimps of C86, and the early-’90s noise-pop of its very own, resurgent label, Slumberland. And in spite of that earnest, staunch reliance on its blueprint, TPOBPAH’s debut full-length is refreshingly watertight throughout. The bookends “Contender” and “Gentle Sons” bundle gunpowder harmonics in jackets of Jesus And Mary Chain squall, the weighty effects of which dovetail nicely with the feathery tones found elsewhere in the record’s guts. The standouts “Come Saturday” and “Everything With You” are straight-ahead pop jammers that fizz with a melodic confidence and sincerity found throughout, most memorably in the Trojan-horse chorus of “Stay Alive.” But just minutes in, as “Young Adult Friction” drives homes the sugars of another teleportive girl-boy vocal coda, it becomes clear they mean what they sing, and vice-versa: They’re sensitive and sublime....full text |
| Prefixmag |
| The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have the kind of band name that breeds skepticism. It’s long-winded and melodramatic, augmented, possibly, by the fact that the members are totally adorable. But the fact that they are well aware of these proposed adversities and still don’t particularly care goes a long way in making them endearing. It’s as if their name is a faint and literal cry for help, certain that their honest simplicity will have them torn apart in the process. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is a glaringly obvious homage of an album that wears its noise-pop tendencies on every line of its face -- and really feels OK about that. Possessing the sonic dexterity of Loveless with the adolescent heart wrenching of Disintegration, the album’s fuzzed-up loudness underscores the unbridled emotion with a surprisingly subtle dab of refinement. There is something distinctly perfect about the naivety that the Pains of Being Pure at Heart seem to effortlessly inject into every bouncy ballad of young love and young living that makes their self-titled debut not only a welcome throwback but a much needed vacation from over-calculation....full text |
| Cokemachineglow |
| Given enough time, and bands, every genre expands and stretches to the point of faceless variegation. That new musicians still describe themselves as alternative rock seems like a bad joke (or worse, further donations toward the Billy Corgan Continuing Relevance Fund)—and indie rock, for better or worse, is likely heading in the same direction. Indie pop, or twee, had such identity issues from the start: the U.K. scene codified by the NME’s 1986 C86 tape and labels such as Sarah Records in the ’80s was, sonically, a largely different animal than its early ’90s American cousin, which centered on noisier recordings and a less aloof approach. A decade or so later, extending the genre from the Field Mice to Belle & Sebastian to, well, Los Campesinos! makes for a knotty family tree. Yet it’s the shared influence of this muddied bloodline that makes the Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s debut album so definitively indie pop—it’s an album that could be called little else. And though it carries the domestic cred of a release on Slumberland Records—the newly resurgent Northern California label whose lofty, four-tracked catalog includes seminal releases by Velocity Girl, the Softies, and Rocketship—the band cribs plenty from its foreign forebears as well. With a voice that instantly recalls the Field Mices’ Robert Wratten, frontman Kip Berman sings with a detached, affected British accent that oozes calm and cool even as treble-heavy guitar chords jangle nervously, relentlessly, underneath him. (And of course as he sings about the trademark Euro-twee topics of books, film, wasted summers, and third-person teenage love—but not his own)....full text |
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart lyrics
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