If you don’t have a bloody valentine, you can still enjoy The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

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MP3: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Come Saturday

Do you ever worry that somewhere along the line you got the wrong impression about yourself and it wound up shaping the person you are today?  Like suppose in 5th grade your teacher complimented a story you wrote and you took it to heart, and now today you find yourself writing when in reality you’d have been much better off as, say, an astronaut. 

I feel like The Pains of Being Pure At Heart may suffer from a similar delusion.  How could they help it, really, with all the positive press referencing My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain, Ride, and just about every indie-tastic band just before the turn of the 1990s?  And with months of buildup around the internet and the local media outlets about the release of their self-titled Slumberland debut, could the album itself possibly live up to its expectations?

A week after its release, critical opinion mostly holds that it did.   Read the rest…