Kip and Peggy in London

all photographs by Liz Clough from our interview with the band

One of the greatest discoveries of 2009, the adorably noisy rockers of The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, are releasing a new EP to promote the new single, the hazy 'Higher Than The Stars'.

Kip

The song, that isn't featured on their debut album, is a gorgeously layered ballad that follows theat early 90's sound we all loved (or at least learned to love once again); and that's not the only great song on the EP - in fact I would say that I like it better than the album itself...

Peggy

If you are one of those that can't appreciate the sea of guitars that surrounds the beautiful music of The Pains, you might want to try this remix by Saint Etienne in which the extension of the song matches the huge name (almost 7 minutes of Saint Etienne Visiting Lord Spank, in fact). An atmospheric, minimal song that reinforces the velvet twee-ness of the vocals. More than beautiful. 

The Pains of Being Pure at Heartt

Photographed by Richard Kelly

I stumbled into The Strongrooms to catch up with Kip Bergman and Peggy Wang from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. For being in a band that has this year been hyped to the high heavens and critically praised, they have an incredibly easy personal presence. 

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, consisting of Kurt Feldman and Alex Naidus as well as Peggy and Kip came together for Peggy's birthday party at a big warehouse in Brooklyn a couple of years ago. Having roped in a few other bands that they all collectively admired, including The Manhattan Love Suicides and Titus Andronicus, the band formed a month prior to it with the goal of performing five songs that they'd written. It made sense that since they were throwing the party, they could play at it too; enjoying the low pressure that the party setting would give. Since they didn't seem to ruin anybody's good time too much, it was deemed a success.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart emerged from the very bosom of the Brooklyn music scene, and what I'm coming to look at as a communal, organic kind of garden in attitude. A plot of land that all the little plants share, growing amongst each other, not too worried about who the biggest or prettiest flower is, cause everyone is a bit of an odd vegetable anyway.

The duo had only answered a couple of other interviews that day, so they weren't too resigned to answer my questions. In fact they were lovely. Kip and Peggy gave all the right answers; and in another case I might have been more skeptical of their apparent ingenuousness, but because they just seemed so, well, normal and sincere with their outlook on their circumstance that I actually believed them.

Check the interview after the jump and mp3 >>