The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, London Lexington

May 15, 2009

‘Young Adult Friction’ is, I think, favourite song of the year thus far; in fact, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart have made the album my dreams are made of. The sorts of things that get me excited (not finitely) include C86 bands (namely The Pastels), Sarah Records, The Cure, Slowdive, cardigans, dual vocals, aesthetic darkness, music to simultaneously dance and think to…

Yes, I realise this is hyperbole, but that’s the way it is. Thus seeing the Brooklynites at their first London gig is a risk indeed – will it turn out that they are in fact just a sum of their parts? Should I just go back home and listen to Souvlaki or pretend that everything in the world is exactly this perfect clash between sugary-sweet and twisted deliberation? Will Kip Berman and Peggy Wang be so cool and aloof that they fail to induce any sort of reaction?

Hold fort, it’s fine. In fact, it’s fucking brilliant (expletive necessary). I feel like I’ve gone back to a state of nature (minus Nietzsche’s wanky overinterpretations) – being born in 1986, I feel a strange connection with the likes of McCarthy, Heavenly, The Field Mice and Talulah Gosh. This is equally wanky as Nietzsche, I do realise, probably to the extent of someone saying “I’m in love with a feeling”. But hell, I can’t help myself.

The contrast between Berman’s breathiness and Wang’s height-storming honeydrip isn’t as remarkable live, feeling almost sieved through the melodies. But it works, lest the band’s sound on The Lexington’s tiny stage would fail to recapture their effortlessness on the self-titled debut. It’s never nonchalant, just thrown together. Influences thrown together, that is, rather than sounds – there is a fine line, and the soundclashes substantiate that.

The feedback of ‘Contender’ is made sweeter live too, in the pursuit of crispness. There’s an uneasy contrast between their effervescent presence and both the teacher/pupil (woah!) involvement of the marvellous ‘Tenure Itch’ and the hints and incest (double woah!)(hello Oedipus) on ‘This Love Is Fucking Right’. So that’s awkward, and then there’s their endearingly nervy exterior which inextricably leads to them running one song into the next. Just imagine being born with the name Kip and not fronting a band named The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart.

To watch this band is to watch a band truly excited by their own material. Wang is the epitome of cute, whipping a heart-shaped lollipop out of her pocket at a stage of the show. And the audience are the flagship release of said cute, clapping oh-so-politely between each song. Yes, I’m part of it. It’s lovely.

Taking it back around 45 minutes, they come on to ‘Doing All The Things That Wouldn’t Make Your Parents Proud’ (from the EP released in 2007) – and such is the extent of their fanboy/girl-inducing presence, the audience are immediately excited. ‘Young Adult Friction’ is phenomenally fulfilling live, everyone in almost tangible unity, singing along. ‘Stay Alive’ sounds, again, less, well, er, noisy (and with less stop-start by far than that description), ‘Come Saturday’ taking on a glorious pursuit of its own, far less tangibly. And next single ‘103′ is emitted as the band’s most straight-up piece of indie pop, at least in terms of sound alone.

Lyrically, this band are so erudite. Take the following line in the almost silly ‘Young Adult Friction’: “now that you feel/you say it’s not real”. It’s as sincere as their name, yet so unmistakably them. The call for encores is such that the band almost run out of songs, prompting Wang to claim that this is the best show the band have ever played. They’ve got the crash of a two-minute garage anthem, the romance of dream-pop’s entirety and the fuzz of the most melodic shoegaze. But all of these throwaway monikers are so irrelevant when all you have to do is listen. This is a music journo faux pas if ever I’ve written one, but it’s true (albeit at this stage of the review).

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart have carved their own niche – they’re the Pretty In Pink of the world of nostalgia. And I bloody hate the concept of nostalgia, but this is just so much more… pragmatic? Yes, pragmatic. That’s it. BREATHE>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>