“Days of Abandon,” the third album by Brooklyn indie-rock band the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, represents a sea change of sorts: original members Peggy Wang, Alex Nadius and Chris Hochheim have all left the group in recent years, and Kurt Feldman, who contributed to the production and was playing the drums, doesn’t tour with the group. The departures left singer-songwriter Kip Berman, for the most part, on his own, to reconstruct a touring version of the band, which takes a night off of touring with the New Pornographers to play at the Space in Hamden on Nov. 18.
The sound of the new album, not surprisingly, differs from the previous two records. The fuzz pedal present for much of POBPOH’s 2009 debut seems to have shed its 9-volt battery; similarly absent are the distortion and bombast of “Belong,” “Abandon”‘s ’90s alt-rock inspired predecessor, replaced by dreamy, delicate guitar and synth textures and gentle harmonies. Still present is the soft-loud-soft arc to songs like “Simple and Sure” and “Coral and Gold,” while “Eurydice” soars with nimble, staccato guitar figures and a big-rock chorus; some overload creeps into the appropriately titled “Until the Sun Explodes.”
Throughout “Abandon,” Berman sings about love and loss, as he always has, but here his voice is imbued with more heft and clarity. But subtlety — textural and timbral — seems more important now; A Sunny Day in Glasgow singer Jen Goma lends vocals to “Life After Life,” one of the album’s highlights, along with (surprise!) horn arrangements by Beirut’s Kelly Pratt on “Kelly,” “Simple and Sure,” “Life After Life” and “The Asp at My Chest.”
“[The new album] was drawn from the experiences we had, and it dealt with a lot of issues leading up to the record, with people leaving, and being alone,” Berman said. “Those weren’t easy issues to admit to… Three of the people I started the band with aren’t in it anymore. I was on my own, writing these songs, dealing with what comes next, what even constitutes the band, what does it mean to be alone and all those things. I didn’t want this record to be about that, but it was inevitable. Listening back to it, I think we did the right thing and we didn’t try to shy away from that.”
The shift underscores what fans have sensed all along: from the beginning, POBPAH has been Berman’s band. He writes all of the lyrics and music, sells the merch, even drives the van between gigs. “I would never let a single lyric of one of our songs be written by somebody else,” he said. “For the most part, I’d say 99.5 percent of the chord progressions of our songs are also written by me.” Still, he’d never want to go it alone, in name or in concept. “I don’t think I could go on the road and tour as something called ‘Kip Berman.’ The Pains of Being Pure of Heart is a band and an ideal. It stands for something more than myself, something that’s difficult to realize or achieve, but it’s an ideal of music. I believe in that ideal, and I don’t always have the courage or strength or determination to say, ‘I’m Kip Berman, and I’m great. I’m like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen.’ I love the idea of the band, even if some people change in the band, it’s still a band to me.”
If songwriting remains a solitary activity for Berman, where others aren’t easily allowed in, Berman is quick to point out that POBPAH’s music benefits from the involvement of his colleagues. “I could stand here and say, ‘I write all the songs,’ and technically that’s true, because I could play an acoustic guitar version of the song and sing it, and you’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the song, and those are the words, and that’s how it goes,'” he said. Along with Feldman and producer Andy Savours (My Bloody Valentine, Sigur Rós), Pratt’s horn arrangements on “Abandon” help sonically, but also signal Berman’s willingness to explore new territory. “The album we did before this, ‘Belong,’ was super guitar-heavy, and [Pratt] was like, ‘If you ever want some horn arrangements.’ At that time, I was like, ‘I love you, man, but the last thing I think I’ll ever need are some really good fluegelhorns.’ But on this record, it actually made sense.”
In early October, POBPAH began touring with the New Pornographers, a much-revered Canadian indie-rock supergroup (Neko Case, Dan Bejar, A.C. Newman are its most visible members), in Vancouver, B.C. They did a few weeks together, then kept going on their own. The tour lasts a little more than seven weeks, and they’re about halfway through.
“We haven’t done a support tour in a long time, but what’s great about this is New Pornographers are a band that I’ve been a fan of since their first album came out,” Berman said. “My cousin, Elspeth, who sings with us: we lived in this squalid house in Portland, Ore., and everyone in the house had really particular tastes in what they thought was good. One of the only bands that everyone could agree on was New Pornographers… In the era of CDs, their CD was on the boombox all the time that summer.”
THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART performs on Tuesday, Nov. 18, at the Space in Hamden, with Call It Arson opening. Showtime is 9 p.m. Tickets are $13 to $15. Information: manicproductions.org.
