The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010
SLUMBERLAND
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, after feeling the pains of breaking up back in 2019, have resurrected lost classics and reverential undercurrents on their new compilation Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010. Ahead of their 2025 reunion tour (you’re not the only ones, Oasis), The Pains round out their titular early years on the titular indie label by resurfacing 10 B-sides from that bittersweet, deadfall era of nostalgia that encircled their eponymous 2009 debut.
The part shoegaze/part ’80s-pop collection moves through a dreamlike haze searching for something soured by the present moment, something aware of lost fortune and purity, something fit for (500) Days of Summer’s hypnosis or a Sofia Coppola montage (for the record, I think the manic-pixie dreamgirl trope is really cool, actually). It’s a bright, wistful album full of fuzzy guitar and feathery synths, and it highlights the band’s lesser-known songs that still operate flawlessly among the current scene’s cramped faux-pop sensibility.
“I’m living in the past / The past is all I ever had,” Kip Berman sings on album opener “Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan,” pulling from an endless trove of the band’s raw feelings. Like an emotional exhale, they mix reverence and irony with the ghosts of pop culture to shine as the focus track for the album. It’s subdued enough to never get mired in too much melancholy, while retaining that jangly urgency that contrasts darker emotional themes—and it’s wholly rewarding. “Say No to Love” finishes off the album in full pop swing, capturing the distant reveries of the band’s shimmering days of youth, using the vinyl lacquer as a sort of mirror to dance with the grief in.
There’s a cinematic quality to The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s body of work, as if every song could be the closing soundtrack to an irreverent coming-of-age film, leaving you wanting to dance in the tragedy of a fading memory. Their sound invokes a sense of late-night drives, noise-canceling headphones dissociation, staring out at the blurred world beyond. The music swells and recedes, never quite giving you the resolution you crave, but something you can accept nonetheless, reflecting the band’s overarching themes of searching for an age, or an identity, long gone.
Stuck in that fleeting feeling of youth fully formed like watching brake lights fly by in a midnight rain, Perfect Right Now reimagines the wistful requiem of our contemporary, identity-obsessed indie culture. Fans of The Jesus and Mary Chain, Belle and Sebastian, The Sundays, and Camera Obscura will probably really like this album—and the rest of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s catalog, as well.
