“Young Adult Friction”
from the album The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
2009
iTunes
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.