The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are a New York indie four-piece and this, their eponymous debut album, follows one EP, a series of split singles and no small degree of fanbase admiration. On it, the band’s slavish dedication to their noise-pop influences is writ large from beginning to end as they mine the seams of the leading lights of British indie pop, C86 and the vault of Sarah Records. Derivative, indeed, but also utterly lovely.
The gang’s all here. There’s Teenage Fanclub fuzz-walls and guitar solos on ‘Everything With You’ and the gorgeous ‘Come Saturday’, Jesus and Mary Chain swagger on ‘Gentle Sons’, The Sundays jangle-pop on ‘The Tenure Itch’ and ‘Stay Alive’ while new single, ‘This Love is Fucking Right’, is pure Isn’t Anything-era My Bloody Valentine. The album’s only skip-through moment is ‘Teenager in Love’ – imagine Bowie’s Absolute Beginners if it had been written by Alphabeat. I dare you.
There is something skilful in how TPOBPAH position themselves in the centre of this most fey – and beautiful – of musical Venn diagrams and they deliver these songs with confidence and panache. However (and this is the album’s major drawback), by devoting themselves so completely to their narrow set of influences, the band display a lack of creative ambition and, through the act of successfully recreating the sound of a Psychocandy or a Bandwagonesque, they can capture none of the excitement generated by these albums’ originality and musical experimentation.
As an exercise in homage, if that’s your sort of thing, TPOBPAH is almost faultless. As a piece of musical expression in its own right, it’s joyful, beautiful and endearing and it survives intense repeat listening, but it’s literally nothing that hasn’t been done before. An enjoyable and promising debut.
Top Tracks: ‘Come Saturday’, ‘This Love is Fucking Right’.
Released 03 February on Slumberland