Photo by Jordan Willis
There’s this thing that happens every year in Austin called “Relay Week.” It’s essentially a state-wide meeting for the best, well, relayers around, which naturally draws a near-exclusively African-American demographic to the city. Promoters capitalize on this, and the downtown area becomes home to an urban music festival and plenty of drink festivals. It’s basically a second SXSW only two weeks after that madness ends. What makes the whole thing hilarious though is that right in the heart of it – in the midst of a bleary, humid Saturday night, with dampened hip-hop subwoofer-crushers pounding the streets – the whitest band in indie rock was playing a show.
I speak of course of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, the anglophelic bookworms turned mainstay scene-icons who draw plenty of cred from just how square they are. And boy are they square, it’s actually pretty strange how the band-pinned, doe-eyed Brooklynites got roped into playing sold out shows, the slight, childhood winsomeness of their first album certainly didn’t demand spotlight attention, and Belong only ups the ante a tad bit. That tad bit involved some dusty alt-rock guitars and the occasional burst of confidence, but they still sound like the New York band that, out of being at the right place at the right time with the right look and the right disposition, became an anthem-maker for a bookish generation – and there was certainly some speculation if that luck would run out come album number two.
The brief answer is no, the long answer is that during the opener “Belong” I watched a grandpa-glasses-wearing, jean-shorted, self-styled dork (who probably had VERY SERIOUS opinions about Dostoyevsky) absolutely lose his shit in the happiest mosh-pit I’ve ever seen. It was at that moment where the snide and the anti-hype dissolved in pure clarity; this is music for those kids. The vagabond intellectuals who need a buttoned-up band to mirror their inner ruminations. Libidinous love story in a library? Check. Creepy crush on younger sibling? Yep. Peggy Wang’s awkwardly charming jokes punctuated the fantasies to a dot. The Pains sing from a place where the nice guys finish first and intellectualism is synonymous with charisma.
On a purely aesthetic level there will always be complaints of the buzzy love mish-mashing together after a while. And that’s true, despite their cuteness, the Pains don’t necessarily have range – so they kept it brief, a solid 80 minutes punctuated by a two-song encore to send us home before the A.M. This was not a demanding live experience; in fact it was pure love-bugged escapism, much like their records. After the set Kip Berman stuck around for what seemed about 45-minutes, talking to everyone who wanted to talk to him. His eyes shined brightly, partially because he was surrounded by worshipers but I think mainly out of fellow music-geekdom. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart smash the distinctions between fan and friend, and they’ve built quite a legacy over the course of two albums because of that. Regardless of what you think of their music, they seem like people that deserve to be happy.
