The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
Featured Album
A effervescent pop debut celebrating the exuberance of youth in all its John Hughes glory
It's no insult, and not much hyperbole, to call The Pains of Being Pure at Heart the first debut in years that takes an uncomplicated stance on being young. Youth feels great, and more than that, it matters. Totaling less than 35 minutes, the album's ten tracks float by with the same butterfly anticipation that fills the last day of school before summer break. These are tight, classic pop songs, their craftsmanship less a product of music-geek encyclopedism than a basic this-sounds-right instinct. The opening bars of "Young Adult Friction" recalls "Love Vigilantes," that terrifically atypical New Order track from 1985's Low-Life; lyrically and musically, "Come Saturday" suggests an improbable double-time mash-up of two Cure staples: "I can't stand to see your picture / On the dresser where I left you / You're 80 miles away, Tuesday / But come Saturday, you'll come to stay." (ie: "Pictures of You" and "Friday I'm in Love.") Incandescent and twinkling, "A Teenager in Love" is the John Hughes/Gossip Girl sound of coming-of-age America, even if what the chorus actually says is, "But you don't need a friend when you're / A teenager in love with Christ and heroin." That "Heroin" sounds like "heaven" in that last line is a result of The Pains 'most obvious aesthetic distinction: a fuzzed-out, reverb-heavy sound that swaddles the vocals in a velveteen blanket of noise. Pop this dedicated to youthful exuberance must be delivered in the native tongue: a dazed mumble.
What's most refreshing about The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is its refusal to speak as metaphor or microcosm for something grander, more adult. The line "Strange teenager, waiting for death at 19," is about exactly that: one strange teenager, not Mortality, or Anomie, or, for that matter, Global Warming or the War in Iraq. That The Pains so gleefully find adolescence beautiful and fraught in itself doesn't mean their LP's all prom dates and locker-bound addictions; even the grad-school crowd can't help chasing the painful purity of "Young Adult Friction": "Between the stacks in the library / Not like anyone stopped to see / We came, they went, our bodies spent / Among the dust and microfiche." So discover the young at decade's end: We are the ones we have been waiting for.
