The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
There isn’t enough data to track how interest in the Pains of Being Pure At Heart has waxed and waned over the years, according to Google Trends.1 However, it’s unlikely we’re living through the high water mark of awareness of the Brooklyn by way of Portland, Oregon, indie poppers — even if some pending anniversary shows might goose interest a little.2
Spending time with an appropriately lauded band that never meaningfully broke through and is flirting with being lost to history is one good reason to listen to Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010, a compilation of early career singles recently released by Oakland-based Slumberland Records. The songs themselves are an even better reason.
Perfect Right Now combines b-sides from 7-inch singles that accompanied the Pains of Being Pure At Heart’s self-titled debut, tracks from the Higher Than The Stars EP and 2010 single, “Say No To Love,” into a supremely enjoyable 10-song package.
A decade and a half of distance has done nothing to dull the charms of these early the Pains of Being Pure At Heart songs. They remain incredibly tight tunes to sway your upper torso to in the vein of classic twee bands like the Field Mice, Belle and Sebastian, Talulah Gosh, the Vaselines, and all the others who helped inspire Nirvana’s softer side.3 The contrast and interplay between heavy-lidded vocals from Kip Berman and Peggy Wang and driving jangle pop is still intoxicating. Their sleepy voices reliably glide just above the reverb that shrouds every note on the compilation like mist hanging around a Pacific Northwest forest. Generally, the lyrics are as moribund as the music is affirming.
When Berman and Wang sing “we will never die,” on the eponymous single, “The Pains of Being Pure At Heart,” it’s clear the sentiment shouldn’t be taken at face value. But crunching guitar, dully shimmering keys and the steady pound of a bass drum argue it’s a concept worth entertaining just the same.
Compiling these tracks in one place and the passage of time provides a new framework for appreciating these songs, too. Indieheads of a certain age have probably heard “Come Saturday” more times than they can count.4 But, the Searching For The Now version is a harder-edged take on the track with the vocals a bit more pronounced in the mix.5 It’s more of a sidegrade than an upgrade on the album version of the song, but it’s interesting and closer to the bruising nearly shoegaze sound the Pains of Being Pure At Heart would home in on for their second album. Meanwhile, “Say No To Love,” is a fuzzy, three-chord gem that radiates the warm feeling of an end-of-summer day spent in some lake-adjacent expanse of wilderness. Its presence on the compilation singlehandedly justifies the collection’s existence.
“Say No To Love” was released in between the band’s first two albums, appearing on neither. It would have been one of the top tracks on either release. It’s a song that sounded incredible back then and sounds Perfect Right Now.
About the writer
Ben Hohenstatt
Ben Hohenstatt is an Alaska-based dog owner who moonlights as a music writer and photographer.
For more information, consult your local library or with parental permission visit his website.
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The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Kids In The Hall, Season Two, Episode Eleven
– “It’s a fact that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was inspired by Beethoven’s Fifth orgasm.”
– “In America, there are 51 states. Or there may be eighty by now. Does England count?”
– “In America, where spelling doesn’t count, people’s pets do.”
– “And everyone’s sad. Coz they don’t get the day off. Coz he’s just the assistant principal.”
– “You chose a child molestor’s jam!”
– “Shirley thought you were quite masculine, and I thought you were less feminine than usual.”
– “Jeremy, look at yourself.” / “Gladly.”
– “Jeremy! You’ve seen more dicks than a cathater! And believe me, some of those cathaters have been talking.”
– “Hi Richard. We’re glad you have a TV.”
“Me, whenever I see an American flag hung in a window of a basement apartment, by guys who have better things to do with their money than buy curtains, I say “That’s America to me.””
“The place where every young man has to answer in his heart the question: What do you love more, your girlfriend or your car? Where that young man can buy a beat-up car for three hundred dollars, and has to spend a thousand to insure it.”
“Jeremy, there’s two things you can be sure of finding in a Manhattan men’s room: No toilet paper, and your phone number!”
“RAAAAAAPE! I’m okay.”
Great episode.
Belatedly, the rest of S1 of The Shield
I already live-blogged a bit of this, so just a few scattershot quote and thoughts I don’t think I’ve said a thousand times already, with overall SPOILERS for the whole series:
– I used to feel like Vic needing to hit Connie to sell her story felt a little too specifically designed to be fucked-up, enough that you could see the strings being pulled, but I think I’ve come around on it. Chiklis and Brown play the absolute hell out of it.
– It’s easy to mischaracterize Vic as always falling into “alpha male” bullshit, but he’s at his genuine best as a person when he uses that tendency for the people around him (“because I’m naturally in charge, it’s my responsibility to make sure everyone around here is functioning properly”). I love him reaching out to and consoling Dutch in “Cherrypoppers” (all of Vic and Dutch’s friendlier interactions are always great), and one of my all-time favorite Peak Vic bits is how earnestly he friend-hunts Julien after ruthlessly blackmailing him, and how he’s baffled by the idea that Julien might find this, you know, somewhat lacking in sincerity. He really does want to create a relationship there and reach out to a guy he can see is drowning! He’s completely unbothered by any sense of dissonance over the fact that he was one of the people holding Julien’s head underwater! Blackmailing Julien over being gay and then sincerely trying to tell Julien that it’s okay to be who he is magnificent Vic Mackey compartmentalization, 11/10, no notes.
– “Don’t worry, David. I’ll make sure they spell your name right.”
– Gilroy tells Vic to let Shane take the fall for the stolen coke scandal, and it’s a great sign of the show’s ability to put you in the character’s shows that I don’t think I even fully realized on a first viewing that Vic can’t do that: Shane is already his accomplice in a murder. He can let Shane willingly take a fall (which Shane almost does in S4, with volunteering to kill Antwon), and trust that Shane won’t turn on him under those circumstances, but actively pushing him under the bus risks losing his loyalty, which could have huge consequences. But I fully buy that Vic isn’t letting himself consciously think about that at this point—he’s focused on loving Shane and wanting to protect him, and any other considerations are buried beneath layers of compartmentalization—and the show doesn’t prompt you to consider something none of its characters are thinking about.
– “Apparently Carl was just, like, her sexual pawn that she totally manipulated.” “Imagine that.”
– “Dragonchasers” remains one of the best Dutch episodes of all time, and with two perfect quotes: “Truth is, I just like to solve puzzles. I would have told you earlier, but I needed time to do a few things” and “If you’re so special, how come a lowly civil servant like me just caught you?” All of which, of course, is made even better, more meaningful, and more devastating in light of the ending. And if you take that sentence out of context, it describes 99% of The Shield.
And the start of season 2. SPOILERY, again:
– What happens with Mayda never gets less horrifying, and it’s no less brutal for being (obviously) off-screen, deftly touched off and conveyed via a barrette and a tattoo. A butterfly and a dove, with all sense of whimsy and beauty crushed by the end.
– The guy who happily accrues three parking tickets a week because it’s still cheaper than regularly paying for a parking garage space has always stayed with me: I love whenever we get these matter-of-fact, working-stiff examples of low-level Farmington criminality as a thriving ecosystem.
– RIP Tio. Consummate professionalism goes up against genius psychopathy and loses brutally, the guy you can work with dying in agony to the guy you absolutely cannot survive having around; it has a different effect than establishing Armadillo’s sheer brutality and menace, which we already knew. It transitions him from Dutch’s general antagonist—the sadist, the psychopath, the cancerous cell, the psychological aberration to be puzzled out—into Vic’s—the guy who fucks up the structural status quo and makes a middle-manager’s life hell.
– Shane and Lem pulling Vic away after they can no longer take him burning off Armadillo’s face is a great moment: Shane’s reflexively aggressive, and Lem’s reflexively decent, but they still wind up being a kind of empathetic odd couple at times, the two members of the team who just have certain things they can’t stomach. It’s beyond risk assessment, in a more primal moral territory of “this is a violation.” They put the line in different places—and Shane eventually winds up having to commit acts even he finds horrific, and live with them, until he can’t anymore—but they both have it, and it’s always interesting to me when they’re unexpectedly in sync.
– I love that Vic’s inability to admit he’s evil is part of what finally sets Claudette firmly against him. Aceveda asks him if there’s any reason Claudette shouldn’t work the case with Tio’s torched shop, but Vic can’t bring himself to even kinda-sorta confess that yeah, there is. The whole thing winds up implicating both Vic and Aceveda and permanently damaging their relationships with Claudette, and it could have all been avoided with a simple coy half-admission at the start.
Great point re: Claudette, she says in the pilot “I don’t judge other cops” but that value is second to the investigation, which Vic is of course stonewalling.
Yeah, the lack of judgment is a kind of social contract–she won’t interfere with his business, but that’s contingent on him not interfering with hers, and then he does, so all bets are off.
Ladyhawke – For the first hour, this is pretty awful and feels like it would be right at home on MST3K, between that terrible Alan Parsons Project score and the incredibly clunky acting and dialogue. Then suddenly things come together just enough in the second hour for this to be entertaining in a non-ironic way. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is about when Michelle Pfeiffer starts to be on screen more. Her presence elevates the performances of Broderick (who really is not suited to this) and Hauer (who looks great in medieval garb, and really does try). But the story never stops being clunky, and tying it so closely to a Christian God and to the actual Middle Ages was a mistake. This might have worked better in a true fantasy setting.
The Avengers, “The £50,000 Breakfast” – A messy story involving a dead man found with diamonds in his stomach and a scheme to pretend a dead tycoon isn’t dead. Some good moments near the end, and two gorgeous Borzois.
Frasier, “Frasier Crane’s Day Off” – Frasier has the flu, and panics that someone else from the station will steal his slot, and then deliriously panics when Niles filling in instead is a huge success. One of the funniest season one episodes, introducing KACL’s restaurant critic Gil Chesterson (Edward Hibbert), and featuring two of my all time favorite Frasier lines:
– Niles:”Although I feel perfectly qualified to fill Frasier’s radio shoes, I should warn you that while Frasier is a Freudian, I am a Jungian. So there’ll be no blaming Mother today.”
– Delirious Frasier to Daphne: “But the moment I give a fig for what you think is the day that England produces a great chef, a world-class bottle of wine, and a car that has a decent electrical system!”
As a Jungian, I’ve always loved this joke.
September 5 – kind of an odd movie to exist / be released right now since the story has been told before in feature and documentary films and also the present-day Israel / Palestine bleakness casts a long shadow over this retelling of 1970s conflicts. But putting that aside (as much as possible), this is a really tight (only just over 90 minutes! take note, all other recent movies!) TV-newsroom thriller with some excellent performances and some wonderful attention to technical detail – I loved all the clunky tech and focus on the person who had to assemble the captions and overlays etc.
One of Them Days was only 97 minutes and felt fairly tight as a result, TAKE. NOTE.
Running down some Indie Spirit noms:
In the Summers – Two kids spend five summers through their childhood with their alternately kind and terrible drunken father. The conceit of seeing the kids grow up (played by multiple actors) while their father (played by rapper Residente) ages but mostly stays the same, formed mostly only by his outbursts and kindnesses, is good but it doesn’t quite separate from the massive annual coming-of-age pile. I imagine these movies mostly differentiate themselves when they happen to line up with your own experience, which is the limit but also the high value in them.
Thelma – Now this is fun. An elderly heist where the age is a factor (June Squibb is in her 90s!) but never the joke, or at least the jokes are leveled by the elderly not at them. Frank about aging without getting overly sentimental. And Richard Roundtree is fantastic in this. Wish the final villain didn’t have his name in the opening credits.
Hard Truths – You know it’s a good year in the international category when a solid Mike Leigh film is the third (maaaaybe second) best option. How is Marianne Jean-Baptiste not nominated?
Green Border – Strong, tense drama taking place along the Belarus-Poland border, though it could easily adapt to most any border dealing an influx of immigrants. The black-and-white is striking but has a distancing effect, and choosing to sprawl to non-migrant characters gives valuable extra perspectives from other angles, but also tends to shove out the immigrant stories by the end. But overall a really affecting portrait of the humanitarian crisis that plagues many parts of the globe, and the people that fight against kindness for reasons they don’t really understand.
Poppa’s House, “Dirty Laundry”
Junior’s father in law J.J. has a billionaire investor considering his company, and he wants to give Junior the opportunity to direct his commercial. Poppa goes on his podcast and accuses Junior of selling out, which pisses Junior off– of course it would, Poppa calling him out and airing family business to his audience like that– which leads to some stubborn digging in by Poppa, of course, and the eventual resolution that gives up a window into Poppa’s own hard upbringing. Unlike, I dunno, probably one of those Tim Allen shows, Poppa isn’t digging in and right because he’s old school and traditionalist and all the other things Boomers imagine about why they don’t like young people now that they’re old. He’s just trying his best and has never really had the tools to approach parenting (or his other relationships) in any other way.
Okay, I should mention it’s pretty funny, especially the commercial where J.J. (Geoffrey Owens, if you didn’t remember) really hams it up– also, it’s a commercial for a foam roller where he plays King Lear, which should give you a good starting point for the ridiculousness in play here.
The Shield season 6 commentaries
Clifton Collins Jr. must have been a world-class asshole on set.
Also weird because, I dunno, man, you were in Capote, calm the hell down.
There aren’t any details on what exactly he did, but it is funny after hearing all the praise the commentators have for guest actors, crew, the production environment guys like Scott Brazill fostered, that as soon as Collins shows up on screen Chiklis is just like “Can we, like, openly rag on this cat, or no? Is that all right?”
What did we listen to?
Paper Tiger, Arch Enemy
Straightforward heavy metal. This might just be my outsider status here, but metal seems up there with police dramas and three camera sitcoms in having a very safe, predictable set of expectations to play in.
”Cruisin’ With Mr. Scratch, John Carpenter
I will enjoy John Carpenter’s music for as long as he keeps putting it out. It’s obviously extremely synthwave but it’s still uniquely him, especially with the simple melodies but also with the elegant production and smaller details I’m too uninformed on music to notice.
Blank Check, “1941” – A pretty solid breakdown of a movie that at best was declared better than Red One. The guests are the hosts of Doughboys, who are very good at analyzing movies, but who don’t seem particularly funny to me so I know what podcast I am not adding. (This week is Raiders, over three hours with comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis. I really have no idea if I want to spend that long listening to someone who is by all accounts a really personable man but who has worn out his welcome with a lot of comics fans.)
1001 Albums etc. – just a couple of albums this week due to a combo of other creative projects and Too Many Meetings at work, but I enjoyed both. Hawkwind’s “Space Ritual” is to some extent two hours of the same thing, but I like their thing quite a bit. I only really knew “Silver Machine” (which isn’t on this epic live album) but the droney rock energy here is compelling and the theatrical monologues between songs are good fun. I liked John Cale’s “Paris 1919” even more, absolutely gorgeous album and exactly the kind of blind spot I’d been hoping to fill as part of this project. I’ve been keeping a list of favourites to refer to in second-hand record shops etc. and this one’s going on the list for sure.
Screen Drafts, Francis Ford Coppola pt. 1 – love these sprawling early-year career overview drafts. This one is split in half so I’ve only heard the bottom half of the list so far, including many films I haven’t seen as a Coppola non-completist. Nothing as dramatic as the Scorsese draft so far but I guess Coppola has more consensus “bad” movies to fill out the bottom. Curious to see if there’s any unexpected gameplay in the top half – I’d assume the top five is pretty predictable but I’d love to be proven wrong.
“Hawkwind’s “Space Ritual” is to some extent two hours of the same thing”
It’s not for nothing they have an album called Repeat Performance! They do the same thing really well.
Shokostavich, the 1917 Symphony – Turned onto him because Sondheim was a fan, and I really like the tension and sense of grandiosity here. Will check out more.
MM gets results! Out From Underneath by Prism Shores is very good, especially the back half. (The first couple tracks didn’t grab me as much.) I’m also digging on Railroad Jerk’s first album, the title song is such a hooky jam.
Never really got into these at the time despite some friends being VERY into them (how much into them? one of the songs from this compilation was initially released on their short-lived record label) but I had a listen to the first couple of albums when they announced their tour and thought they were pretty great. So I guess I’ll see them in November – better late than never.
Year of the Month update!
This February, you can sign up to write about anything from 2016, including these movies, albums, and books.
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rogue One
Feb. 11th: Lauren James: Inside
Feb. 12th: Bridgett Taylor: Doctor Strange
Feb. 13th: Cori Domschot: Ghostbusters
Feb. 14th: Gillian Nelson: Milo Murphy’s Law
Feb. 18th: John Roberts: Silence
Feb. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Pete’s Dragon
Feb. 27th: Cori Domschot: Hidden Figures
Feb. 27th: John Bruni: Jet Plane and Oxbow
Feb. 28th: Sam Scott: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
And March is going to be Silent Era Month, where you can join these writers in examining your favorite silent movies and anything else from the 1910s and ’20s!
Mar. 26th: Sam Scott: Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Indeed, the self-titled and especially “Young Adult Friction”‘s “Don’t check me out” chorus were inescapable for teenage me who was just getting into all these bands. Good stuff.
I feel like those tracks came up a lot in venues’ pre-concert playlists. Delta Spirit and Heartless Bastards were other bands I remember hearing a lot in that context at that time, too.