metric reflection

Pure Hearted Contender

I wonder what it’s like to be a young and energetic music fan these days.  Most of the best music is more fully enjoyed with the proper context: an understanding of at least the generation before this one, which serves to provide context and texture.  How can one enjoy Interpol or any of its countless spawn without understanding the genius of Ian Curtis and Joy Division?  How can one contextualize the crop of electro bands without recalling a whole slew of synth-pop and other 80s bands?  Without this background, we’re doomed to repeat the worst of excesses: soon we’ll have hair bands and Right Said Fred all over again.

This may be just the lament of someone watching the eclipse of their 20s.  I remember desperately trying to figure out why a bunch of respected writers were so enthralled with Bauhaus (I only knew the Cure) as the standard bearers of a genre.  Or why the Clash mattered so much more than the Ramones to anyone with what seemed like good taste.  Only ten years removed, awash in the flannels and ripped jeans of early grunge, I relied on others’ sense of nostalgia to provide me the context of the cooler older music fans I knew.  I savored every morsel, every bit of musical trivia, because they were hard to come by, buried in the letters to the editor of Spin or a random music magazine I found at the back shelf of Waldenbooks.

I guess that’s my roundabout, crotchety way of saying that it must be difficult to establish context and depth when every fact is available with just a few key strokes; when any band that doesn’t market itself well enough or attract enough buzz will be forgotten to the electrons.

I sure hope that doesn’t happen to The Pains of Being Pure At Heart.

Their sound is an algebraic computation of  My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Slowdive, filtering out the excesses of noise and meandering experimentation of some of their shoegazery predecessors.  None of those excesses should be sneered at, of course; they’ve set the stage for where we are musically, and, frankly, a lot was pretty damn good.

…Pure at Heart can bring the noise when they need to, as they do in their opening track, Contender.

But whenever they do, the noise is subdued: it’s noise for texture, not for static.  The melodies dance at the front of the songs, rather than lurk in the background.  The snare drum sets an echoing pace, ensuring the songs never get stuck on a side trail.  They’re poppy when they need to be, layering harmonies as a new texture over the static:

This humanizes the machine. It separates us from the utopian future the 80s musicians were simultaneously lampooning and heralding (yes, there were harmonies in shoegazery’s past, but the songs were never propelled by the harmonies).  It reminds us that any future will be built by man.  That even as we build these technological tools around us to organize and enrich and confound our lives and collective knowledge, it will all be meaningless without recognizing the reasons why we’re rushing down the field.   Plus, it gives them a chance to throw in the hooks to make their buzz that much louder.

My formative musical years took shape in the shadow of that era, when musicians looked back to the 70s for inspiration.  Young music fans like me had time to hold on to each band for a while, savoring the music the way we enjoyed the scents of production that burst forth in full bloom whenever we opened that new disc. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are good enough to deserve that lasting attention.

Besides, as my friend Televisionarie said, you have to “support any group ballsy enough to write a song called ‘This love is fucking right!’”