The top 10 albums of 2009: No. 1

The Pains of Being

Pure at Heart
The Pains of Being

Pure at Heart

In what plays like a love note to mid- to late-'80s jangle pop and shoegazer distortion, the debut album by New York foursome The Pains of Being Pure at Heart skips and zips, chirps and chimes, altogether chipper and defiantly alive. With élan that verges on delusion, their bright-eyed melodies defend a heroin casualty and a brother-sister tryst, as well as relate more familiar youthful pursuits, like the raging impulse to lock lips and hips.

Such urges fuel anticipation and impatience in "Come Saturday," sprinting drum rolls and a tumbling guitar rush playing the role of the firing-on-all-cylinders adrenal glands. The library, such a testament to the pent-up, the potential, is one place where desires erupt and give the microfiche something to stare at, in the cheekily titled "Young Adult Friction." The male-female vocal blending of guitarist Kip Berman and keyboardist Peggy Wang-East fosters the Romeo-and-Juliet overtones.

True to Shakespeare, there is tragedy, though you probably wouldn't know it before you read the lyrics. A plucky snare-and-kick-drum beat and a guitar line evoking the piano hook of David Bowie's "Modern Love" open "A Teenager in Love," belying the fact that Alli, the teenager in question, has died, most likely as a direct consequence of her lust for life, which happened to involve heroin. When someone impugns Alli as being "dead all along," Berman scornfully tells the heavens (or quite possibly her gravestone), "He hadn't lived a day / the way you lived in your final days."

Murkier --- or what would be murkier if Berman and Wang-East didn't sound so chaste --- are the apparent tale of incest in "This Love Is Fucking Right!" (blithely unrepentant) and the not-necessarily-consensual couplings in "The Tenure Itch" ("These late night sessions, he's master still / Just one more lesson leaves you twisting to his will.")

But the album's brilliant melodies and endearing optimism bathe everything in a radiant, innocent light. It's all too easy to get lost in the sweet alliance of burbling bass, frisky drums, jangling guitar and singing keyboard. So pure at heart, so high on life.