The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart: Higher Than The Stars EP

There's nothing more frustrating than a band drilling themselves into the ground before they've even truly lived.

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart are a relatively new band that not long ago released their very first album. It was OK, not bad, nothing memorable but nothing to smash furniture about.

So, just in case you'd forgotten what the band sound like, they've decided on releasing another batch of songs in the same year, all equally as disorganised as the previous material and all completely unneeded overall.

Derivative, almost nonchalant indie-pop rears its ugly head way too frequently in the brief twenty minute duration of the CD and never once is it as appealing or digestible as it was on their eponymous debut (and even then it was a bit much). Introductory and title track Higher Than The Stars sounds like a bad version of A-Ha's Take On Me with nasty, tinny synths and a generic simplistic backing drumbeat. It's bad yes, but even worse is its immediate successor 103 which takes the sickly sugary-ness to a whole new level. A 'lo-fi' guitar (really it's just tinny and a bit piercing) strums the whole way through as campy male vocals sing along to an almost Disney melody. Not even the female vocal harmonies can save you this time round unfortunately.

Our main problem is with the fact that over the course of the five tracks, not one song seems to stand out, opting instead for one constant stream of annoying, badly produced sound and refusing to diversify, even once. The closest they get to mixing things up is the final song, a remix of the title track and it isn't even created by them which says something about how much music they really have in them.

Slow down with the actual procedure of music-making, give your material time to fully realise itself and let it go where it wants to go instead of forcing it out. There's no need to rush the process and that's something these guys really need to grasp.

We're not trying to sound overly harsh here but we just don't see the point in creating more of the same troubled indie-pop when you're still getting all the attention needed from a full-length release at the beginning of the year. Maybe these attempts were surplus to requirements from the debut or maybe they were recently created, we honestly don't care, all we know is that it's five more tracks of needless, forgetful music from a band that were struggling with originality in the first place. 

There's no more space in their selected genre for tired musicians such as themselves and if they keep going the way it looks like they're going then we don't think they'll be there much longer. An exterior of of sugary pop can't hide the withering bones of a band that we feel need to rethink what, who and where they are as a musical collective.