Music, musings and miscellanea

This review originally appeared at Chartattack.com

Brooklyn, N.Y.’s The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart won over a lot of fans in 2009 with the fuzzy indie pop of their self-titled debut.

But a lot of heads were turned when it was revealed that their follow up to that modern lo-fi masterpiece would be recorded and mixed by English duo Alan Moulder and Flood, probably best known for their bombastic production on ’90s classics like Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral and Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness.

Belong, the resulting album, is far more polished than its predecessor. But while not espousing the virtues of his favourite bands, singer and guitarist Kip Berman maintains that underneath the walls of guitars, the band were able to retain their core identity.

“It’s sort of a mall-rock aesthetic,” he says. “If you aim for that and you are who you are, the reality comes out in between.”

Here are some other things Berman had to say:

You guys took a bit of a gamble with this record. Have you been happy with how it’s been received?

It’s not so much the reception. We were just really happy with the record we got to make. It’s such a relief that our idea for it and our songs got captured in the way we wanted them to sound. Once you do that, you can’t control much else. But you do you have that record on your shelf that sounds the way that you feel happy with. That was really the exciting part.

When was the decision made to take things up a notch on the production side of things?

I think that’s a process that started back in 2007 when we started the band. Each successive thing we’ve done was to try to get better.

I still don’t think we’re very good. Our first recording was self-recorded with a drum machine and that was okay. Then we got Kurt [Feldman] lined up to play drums and he really improved things. We recorded [the band's debut] at my friend’s basement studio and that sounded better. After that we recorded the Higher Than The Stars EP and another mixer came into mix the single — each thing we’ve done has tried to improve on the thing before and try to get to a better spot.

Were Flood and Alan Moulder at the top of your list of people you’d like to work with?

It’s not like we had a list.

We were excited to work with Archie Moore on the first album. He brought a lot to the mix of the first album. If you’d heard what it sounded like when we were first done recording and then Archie Moore mixed it, it sounded way better. We were all really excited about that process and the work he did.

On this record, getting the opportunity to work with two people who have been involved with a lot of the records that we love and a lot of bands that we love just made intuitive sense. If you want to make a big American rock record, those are the two British guys that you want to talk to. Our idea going into this was make it a really visceral, powerful, kind of excessive… not excessive in a bad way, but superfluous amounts of emotion and feeling and sound and really just push things beyond reasonable subtleties and good taste.

It’s sort of a mall-rock aesthetic. Let’s go further than cool. When you look to bands like Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins and listen to bands Alan Moulder mixed and Flood produced as well as examples of an ideal. It’s always that thing, where if you aim for that and you are who you are, the reality comes out in between. Our record doesn’t sound half as bombastic as Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, and nor should it. But having that as a goal pushed us beyond our normal comfort zones, and we were pretty psyched with how it turned out.

Yeah, it sounds great. And probably a good thing you left the orchestras out.

Yeah. There are ideas of excess that are positive and then there are ideas of excess that are not positive. And we didn’t really need to bring the string section in for our second record on Slumberland Records. Nor could we afford to. We had a synthesizer that sounded like strings.

Did you spend a lot of time in the studio compared to past records?

It’s an interesting thing. The first record was chopped up. We recorded in my friend’s basement, but we could only use it when his roommates weren’t home. It wasn’t like a solid stretch of time.

This time, it was pretty solid. It was in two parts. We did all the music in New York, and then went on tour and ended in London, went into a studio, did all the vocals and mixed it. I think we had not enough time to pursue any dumb ideas. It was still very around the clock, and we can’t really afford this anyways. Even though those dudes are awesome to work with and they want to work with you, we want to make the most out of this opportunity and get the most out of it that we can.

You’ve spoken in the past of your love for fuzz boxes and I read that you had one that was custom made to sound like the Smashing Pumpkins.

It’s funny, because at the time — if you go back two years ago that band name never came within 500 words of our band name. But it’s a sound we’ve always really loved. And just because we love the Smashing Pumpkins doesn’t mean we don’t also really love The Pastels or Rocket Ship.

Growing up when we did, there were two worlds of music. There was radio music which wasn’t always bad. A lot of the times it was Nirvana and Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins and Ash — this really big huge sounding alternative rock — we love that. That’s just what we grew up with. And at the same time there’s the underground stuff which was basically just pop-punk and then later on it was indie-rock and indie-pop.

I don’t know if anything unifies those two loves. But there’s something about stepping on a fuzz box and playing some chords that never gets old to us. Even if it’s not something new. The Ramones weren’t something new. They just stuck to something that they thought was the true spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, and in a weird way they corrupted it to their own vision. Now people look at them as the true spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a process that goes on and on, and we’re happy to be a cog in that wheel.

It seems like the lines between the radio and the underground were a lot more blurred in the ’90s than they are now.

It’s almost like a wave. There’s always that moment where the underground breaks into the commercial world. That happened in the early 2000s when bands like The White Stripes became huge and they were on Sympathy For The Record Industry. It was a bunch of stuff like The Dirtbombs, who up to that point had never been considered a commercial or marketable beyond a niche community. Or like when Teenage Fanclub were playing on Saturday Night Live.

Instances where something cool creeps into the normal reality. Then it recedes and you get copycat bands and it becomes the thing where it’s like “We’ve got to sign the next Nirvana” and you get Candlebox. That is the mentality of the music industry. But if it weren’t for Nirvana, I wouldn’t have known who The Vaselines were when I was 14 or have been curious about the Beat Happening. It paved the way to discover more music.

I’m glad that you mentioned Ash there. I always thought they were underrated.

They’re so underrated. I love 1977. It’s an amazing record. Everyone romanticizes [Weezer's] Blue Album and Pinkerton, but I think that’s right up there.

I love Supergrass as well. Just big, fuzzy, great pop songs. It’s all the good ideas of punk with an extras ounce of mega-ness… they take it up to another level.

We were music fans before we were a band, so we have more than a healthy interest in stuff involving bands.

You’ve called yourself a record nerd in the past. Do you make records for all the other record nerds, with nods to your favourite albums built into the music?

I wonder who are the bands who aren’t record nerds. Like it’s always a surprise when a band really likes music. Who are these bands?

I think at the end of the day, everybody who plays music must be in some way. I think it’s really funny when I see old records of ours selling for a lot of money on eBay. I couldn’t give those away when I had them. I should have kept some more of those. It could have been my retirement fund.

You played in a couple bands before Pains Of Being Pure At Heart — The Starve and Jackie — that sounded much different than Pains. Has your music changed as your tastes have?

I really loved the Starve. That’s probably the band I felt the most at home in until Pains came along. I wrote all the songs and lyrics and sang. It’s hard to explain why The Starve is similar to Pains. It’s this idea of emphatic, over the top expression of an ideal.

With Jackie, it was fun, but The Starve was emotionally connected to the ideals of music that I love most in the same way Pains is. Me and Alex [Naidus, bass player] when we met were both big fans of the Exploding Hearts and they probably inspired us to play music a lot. They’re just great written songs. They’re catchy and immediate.

I feel like progress in music isn’t about boundaries and who can play the loudest or who can play the fastest. I think I realized this in seventh grade. No one is better pop-punk than NOFX or Propagandhi. You can’t outdo that. But it’s that realization that you can’t out Merzbow, Merzbow. There’s always someone on the periphery. And at some point you push boundaries to for the sake of boundary pushing, which is great.

But for me, progress is at the centre, where you just write pop songs with energy and enthusiasm with lyrics that are really good. That ideal doesn’t seem like it ever will be fully realized. The Buzzcocks were great, but 20 years later the Exploding Hearts come along and they’re really great in a similar way but at the same time completely different. It means a different thing to be a pop-punk band in Portland in 2000 than it did in Manchester in 1978. And you shouldn’t pretend to know what it’s like to be in Manchester in 1978.

To me it’s that ideal, that if you can write a great song in under four minutes with great lyrics, there’s always more room in my life for that.

“Heart in Your Heartbreak”