Posted on June 1, 2009 - by Mark Zonda

American wheeze

Last sunday I was lucky enough to see one of the bands driving my recent days letteraly insane: “The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart“. Roque from Cloudberry Records already had the chance to tell me that if he could bet on the success of one of the bands he produced “The Pains” would have been one of the fews who could make it along with Twig and few others more. And how right he was! Since the first notes from the soundcheck in Hana-Bi, in Marina di Ravenna (Italy) under the wooden roof of the seaside venue, it was suddently clear that was gonna be the night! What hit us the most (I was eating grilled meat when I was cought by anxiety and I jumped up from the seat on the notes of “This love is fucking right”) was the clear perfection of the sound of the band. Not only seemed like someone has put their cd randomly on the wait, not only each note was at its place at his fucking moment… but what came out was even better than on the record! This happened to be true from the very start of the show. Listening to the album I did expected more shoegaze oriented distorted volume multiplied on different layers of delay on a x11 Spinal Taps scale. How wrong was I! Sound was just as right as human ears would be able to stand from the first lines of the crowd and as cleas as crystal, executed and played with not a single note out of place. Now I’m beginning to wonder why the album was mixed that way, singe Kurt’s voice deserved to be heard.

All the people in the (wooden) house was really excited, showing great smiles on their faces nad big stars on their eyes. I mean… this is what pop was meant to be made! This band played less than 45 minutes and anyway we were all wishing those delightful moments could last forever. But it was time for “Vivian Girls“.

Who knows. Maybe we would appreciate better this band if the girls had a show on their own, but people was so excited and enthusiastic abut “The Pains”  (they already played together in London) that it was like throwing on stage “The Dukes of Stratosphear” after “The Beatles” had their show. Seems like the band got lost while attempting to reach the venue (and I can assure you that there’s nothing easier than that to reach that place in the middle of the country-nowhere), and they were forced to improvise a soundcheck rightaway (most of the people believed that they were already performing). I was delighted by their punk sounds, the hofner bass (I was never meant to see a real Hofner bass vis-à-vis), a guitar player that looked like the twin sister of Nina Piroth (at least for that night) and a final performance where the girls swapped all their instruments while performing one of their last songs (Ok, I admitt I was a little distracted from the song when the former bass player took off some of her dresses in order to kick some serious hits to the drums).

After the show I exchanged some words with Kurt. He’s great! Always smiling, enthusastic and so fucking polite. We laughed about how crazy (in a positive way) Roque is, band’s experience in California where they starred on a tv-show, how strange it is for a band basically playing swedish-oriented indie-pop having such a success in America, where it’s very hard to see other bands doing that stuff, and their increasing popularity. Good looking band, totally cool people, great pop-hymn writers and very easy on stage. Maybe one day we will look back at these days and thinking how lucky we were to be there while they were not as famous as Blur. Till then I hope I’ll have the chance to see one of their shows once again. I have to catch the blue shirt!!!

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart + Vivian Girls Live Pics

The Pain Of Being Pure At Heart | Clip#1
The Pain Of Being Pure At Heart | Clip#2
Vivian Girls | Clip1
Vivian Girls | Clip2

Vivian Girls – “Where Do You Run To”

Let it ring on...

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• This band is fucking right! (0)
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• Indietracks 2010 (Pt.2) (0)