The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Village Underground

With the release of their third LP, the Brooklyn four-piece The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart have changed up their style somewhat, taking a sizeable step on the perhaps inevitable journey from raw, romantic, lo-fi outsiders (a sound they perfected on release number two, 2010's still-excellent Belong) to glossy, marketable indie-pop of a more universally digestible form.
That's not to say that with the arrival of Days of Abandon they've abandoned completely the heart-on-sleeve emotion that bore them through their first two albums (producing songs like the beautiful Heart In Your Heartbreak), but the guitars sound a little less raw, the orchestration a little more subtle, the heartbreak kept a little more closely in check. Song like Simple and Sure lack the same shout-along quality, but frontman Kip Berman's voice remains enchanting, and by backing this with a fuller, lusher, at times orchestral sound (as in The Asp at My Chest), the band have definitely found a promising new direction in which to march.
The band's moniker, equal parts difficult-to-say and difficult-to-forget, comes from an unpublished children's story (written by a friend of the band) about 'realising what matters most in life', and its not much of a surprise, then, that the band should carry themselves as such head-in-the-clouds dreamers. I suppose it's possible to get a little turned off by this incessant romanticism, this relentless charm, but I've never been in that camp. And even if you are, with the band having negotiated a sizeable shift in dynamic, taking their sound back toward slightly more mainstream ground, there's likely never been a better time to see them.