Imagine you’re at bar trivia and you receive three clues: 1) This band’s album was produced by the same guy who produced The Smashing Pumpkins. 2) This band is named after heart-ache. 3) This band sings things like “Tell me again what the bodies for/ ‘cause I can’t feel it anymore/ I want to hurt like it did before.” When did this band make music?
The answer has to be the early ‘90s, when angst ruled the airwaves and guitars were the instrument for deep introspection. But the band, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, released Belong a few months ago—just the latest sign that early ‘90s rock has been enjoying a well-deserved resurgence. In addition to The Pains, Big Troubles and Yuck also put out excellent albums indebted to sounds from that period, ranging from the hazy explosions of My Bloody Valentine to the simple yet cryptic riffs of Pavement.
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart draw from fuzz-and-jangle bands like The Darling Buds or the bubble grunge (more bubble, less grunge) of Velocity Girl.
Their music works by exploiting contrasts: chiming guitars gain clarity next to scuzzed ones, soft vocals grow more poignant over loud instrumentation, flat drums are flatter heard through the textured cloud of distortion. Interestingly, the best song on Belong is the cleanest—on “My Terrible Friend” stellar bass work floats you from one grand synth-fueled hook to the next.
Overall though, this is a guitar album. The guitar on “Heavens Gonna Happen Now” gleams like ‘90s rock radio; “Girl Of A Thousand Dreams” has proto-grunge underpinnings. Mumbled sweet vocals, like those in the gently cascading “Strange”—“When everyone was doing drugs, we were just doing love”—align nicely with the lyrical sensibilities of the hey-day of alternative rock.
Big Troubles’ Worry packs more punch than Belong—after all, this is trouble, not purity. Worry begins with machine gun drumming and whirling synths, evoking the opening instrumentation of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep,” but Big Troubles are less interested in gazing at their shoes, more interested provoking movement.
The whole thing sounds like it’s coming from a muffled hurricane, which has a Darwinian effect—the riffs that make it through the fuzz alive are best equipped to ensure the future of the riff gene-pool. On the first half of the album, survival of the fittest works its magic, starting with “Video Rock” and peaking with the stunners “Georgia” and “Freudian Slips.”
“Georgia” is constructed around a simple, lovely guitar riff like those heard on Pavement records (e.g. “Box Elder”); “Freudian Slips” blasts out the gate—blows up the gate may be more accurate—with a wave of gleeful noise topped by completely irresistible guitar. When a second guitar rises to echo the first, it’s aural atomic fusion, a sonic supernova. But the danger of all that fuzz is that the ear can automatically relegate it to background noise, like city traffic or a distant lawn mower, and the second half of the album does not supportDarwin’s theories as well as the first.
Yuck’s self-titled album is the most varied. Vocally, Yuck shares Belong’s heart-on-the-sleeve lyricizing, with phrases like “you could be my destiny, you could mean that much to me,” but the singing is more diverse—screaming sometimes, a solid impression of Malkmus on occasion, fewer duets. Belong and Worry are sequenced to start big, and Yuck is no different, leading off with the steady bass and whining guitars of “Get Away” and the cracked strum of “The Wall.” More than Big Troubles’ mumbles, Yuck put lyrics out front, and the first two tracks establish a feeling of immobility and dissatisfaction. “Georgia” (not to be confused with the Big Troubles’ track of the same name), which would not have been out of place on the first Pains’ album, provides a brief moment of upbeat respite before the album sinks into glum reflection in a series of beautiful slow songs reminiscent of later Pavement.
At the end, the band tries to punch through its mood with volatile guitars—the anthem “Operation” starts like the ramp-up in Sonic Youth’s “Teenage Riot”; the seven minute closer “Rubber” unfolds as if the band were slowly climbing, grimy but majestic, out of a hole somewhere.
All three of these bands may belong in an earlier time, but they’re doing a damn good job in the present.
