by the Pains of Being Pure at Heart
(Slumberland)
You can get away with a lot more by playing innocent than by shoving
it in everyone’s face. So here’s a bubbly, sunshiny basement-guitar-pop
song about anonymous sex in a public library, presumably between two
pencil-neck horndogs who still carry lunch boxes well into their 20s:
“We came, they went, our bodies spent/Among the dust and the
microfiche.” There isn’t a single off beat here: straight four down the
line, everything post-Velvets by way of mid-’80s UK indie jangle, the
breakdown-not-bridge the same music as the rest of the song only with
the guitars louder, then gone, then rising back up, ready for more,
only to be greeted with a chanted “Don’t check me out.” On paper, this
sounds insufferably coy. In aural fact, I never play it once without
playing it again at least twice more. Like rapping, it’s nowhere near
as easy as it looks to do this kind of thing right.
by Cause Co-Motion!
(Slumberland)
If the Pains of Being Pure at Heart infuse their dink-indie with big
hooks, Cause Co-Motion! are content to keep everything short and sharp.
Really short: six songs, 10 minutes. Everything about it whizzes by,
jagged and flat; you can concentrate, but you’re better off just
letting it pelt you, like toy-pistol caps being thrown from five feet
away. (Or maybe I’m just confusing the overall effect with how the
cymbals sound.) The singer, Arno—of course there aren’t any last
names with them—sounds like Joey Ramone with a much smaller
throat, and in another smiling nod to bite-size tradition (see also
Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue”), they title one of the songs “It’s
Time,” after the album that preceded this EP.
by Crystal Stilts
Another Slumberland group keep up their catchy primitive reverb
stomp, leading off this live-in-studio web freebie with two songs more
immediately propulsive and memorable (to my ears) than anything they’ve
yet recorded. Both “Through the Floor” and “Sycamore Tree” sound like
something overheard at a prom in the Munsters mansion: basic tremolo
rockabilly riffs, kick-and-snare an 8-year-old could get down to, a
singer who seems to mistake every vowel for “O” and about half the
consonants, too. These versions of “Shattered Shine” and “The Dazzled”
from the band’s debut don’t improve the originals much, but I did
mention this was free, right? 
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart play the Capitol Hill Block
Party on July 25.