Among the current crop of indie rock front men, few are so humble as Kip Berman from the Pains of Being Pure At Heart. Or maybe ‘humble’ isn’t the right word; at times, he seems downright self-loathing. “I don’t know if this record will mean anything to anyone in 10 years; I don’t if it means anything to anyone now,” he told Stereogum, regarding this year’s excellent Belong. Reflecting on how the band’s first two albums might be compared, he imagined a listener saying “you sucked and now you suck even more.”
I am not one of those listeners. Since the band debuted in 2009, I’ve followed their work closely and with growing enthusiasm. What the band never gets credit for is their hooks, which are big and unexpected and turn their best tunes into earworms that live for days in your head. “Everything With You,” a live performance of which is embedded above, is one of them. It’s everything I love about the band — the dreamlike vocals, swaddled in blankets of guitar, shot through with expert pop sensibility.
Last night I saw the band live for the first time. It was at a club on the outskirts of the Mission called Slim’s, which is small and has tables in the back so that people can consume dinner and indie rock simultaneously. Slim’s was maybe three-quarters full when I arrived, at the end of a desultory set from Twin Sister. The Pains took the stage reeking of Brooklyn — the guitarist in a Johnny Greenwood haircut and a scoop-necked shirt whose sleeves stopped uncertainly at the elbows; a manic pixie dreamgirl at the keyboards, her face mostly theoretical behind a thick curtain of bangs. Standing in the middle was Berman, energetic and sincere, compensating for his bandmates’ studied anti-charisma with dramatic strumming and rock-god poses borrowed from his heroes. Berman’s banter was minimal and oddly bloodless — “Everyone here is just so nice” — but he observed the first rule of rock ‘n’ roll success, which is to always act as if you are playing to a much larger room.
One of the reason I’m fond of the Pains is that they’re so consistent. If they’ve written a bad song I haven’t heard it, which makes them all but unique in my world. They arrived fully formed with a template that works, and they’re sticking with it. Over the course of two records and a handful of EPs they seem to have grown without really changing; rather, they are becoming more like themselves. The price for this is a certain sameness that pervades their live set; frequently last night I found myself asking, “Now which one is this again?” But even that didn’t really bother me, because a few seconds later some killer hook would come crashing around the corner, and I’d resume pogoing in place. I was impressed with the band as musicians — they play tight and loud, and in the small club the songs off Belong sounded huge.
“Eventually every band fails,” Berman told the Line of Best Fit earlier this year. “You are a failure if you fail to have success and if you become successful you will eventually become irrelevant and become a failure. Every band will become a failure — it is inevitable.” He’s probably right, and yet I find myself rooting for this band to succeed — to play clubs larger and fuller than Slim’s, to succeed to the point that Berman no longer has to work the merch table before shows. In the meantime I just enjoy the music and hope for the best — which, happily, is Berman’s approach as well. “For this record, I don’t know how it is going to be received,” he said. “But at the same time, I know we made this album how we wanted it to sound and we are proud of it. Whatever happens — even if it gets shat upon — it doesn’t matter, because we really love these songs.”
