The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
"Belong"
[Slumberland]

The speaker-swallowing guitars that rise up at the start of "Belong" roughly translate to "fuck twee." The new Pains of Being Pure at Heart aren't the same cassette-hissers angling for that anchor spot on your indie valentine C60 mix. Not quite. Bulked up by the sonic tinkering of 1990s alt-rock studio gods Flood and Alan Moulder, these sometime pun-lovers are giving life to their own Siamese Dream, gunning for the Pumpkins at their most pop. And, at this point, they're beating Billy Corgan at the game he invented.

But Pains aren't just going big and making mega-budget videos with hundreds of mudded-up extras just because they can. In 2011, it's not that simple (or that easy). The quartet are still on revered indie Slumberland, a label that spent the 90s offering alternatives to the alternative rock Pains are aping here. "We equally romanticize the Pastels and the Smashing Pumpkins," band leader Kip Berman told me in a recent interview-- a thoroughly modern perspective. On "Belong", he sings: "In your eyes, in the sun/ But we just don't belong." This is an outsider anthem spiked with sonics that are primed to let lots of people in. The mulching distortion is instantly familiar, but the translation has changed.

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart "Belong" by Slumberland Records

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