The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - Belong [Slumberland]

4.9

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart introduced themselves in 2009 with a fairly solid self-titled debut that was a addition to the ever growing indie pop genre of music that is rapidly filling up the indie community. On The Pain's sophomore effort, Belong, a much more bland and trite sound ruins the entire LP with layers upon layers of synths, occasional heavy guitars, and simple drum beats.

The only thing I can think of when listening to The Pains is unoriginality and blandness that their music truly is. Take some very soft, innocent vocals against heavily layered sound walls with heavy twee and noise pop influences and you have The Pains' sound. Occasionally there are some good melodies out there like on "Heavens Gonna Happen Now" or "Strange". But, I can't hate everything about Belong; it's pretty catchy at points. The beginning of the album is its strongest point starting off strong with "Belong" a heavy guitar rocker followed by the highlight of Belong "Heavens Gonna Happen Now" with Kip Berman's moans of "So don't sit there and look scared."

All of the songs have cliched themes of love and forgiveness backed by Berman's almost unlistenable vocals. They aren't bad at first, but with more delve into Belong, they are bland and almost emotionless and they have an almost irritable quality to the sounds he make that seem to stick out in the layering of instruments. The instrumentation is weak and has overly simple indie pop hooks that have been used for years by previous indie pop groups.

The ideas of Belong are exactly getting across to me as well. One minute their breaking out into a guitar frenzy of noise and then they are going into this synth odyssey. I understand it's variation on the album, but it doesn't work for a twee pop band like The Pains. In the end, blandness is the ultimate downfall of Belong and lack of originality; an obvious step down from their debut and ultimately their sound.

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