The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Greetings from the land of article writing procrastination. Today I will entertain you with my thoughts on The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, not to be confused with notions of a self-help book. This 4-piece Brooklyn-based band has seemingly blown up overnight thanks to a little thing known as Pitchfork (PFork's review, overall reviews on Metacritic), but then also thanks to the band's generally awesome music.

First of all, let’s just take a minute to contemplate the name of this band. It captures in one breathtakingly long phrase the notion that anyone who is inherently good by nature will probably experience some form of disappointment. Because why? Because the world is generally shitty? Because people who are nice get walked on? Because they get their hearts broken? Because of any other number of reasons? Probably yes, to all of these queries.

But then there’s also the sense that this is a totally pop music band name, with “The Pains” being an easy abbreviation that triggers thoughts of The Beatles or the Killers, or The Smiths.

The Smiths is where the thoughts really start going, because the music is so reminiscent of their 1984 self-titled release. The main difference is definitely in the vocals, with The Pains being more anthem-based sing-a-longs, but the same idea of crooning understatedly is at heart in both albums.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart tap into the pubescent stage of their lives for main lyric topics, especially in “Young Adult Friction,” with lines like “between the stacks in the library/ not like anyone stopped to see/ we came they went, our bodies spent/ among the dust and the microfiche.” This is all cleverly combined with the idea of library checkouts being somehow tied to checking a human being out from head to toe. I like it.

If you are in the Columbus area, The Pains are playing at the Summit on May 1, and if you're not in Columbus, check out the rest of their tour dates.

Check out the music video for "Everything With You":