If they haven't been already, Puro Instinct, formerly Pearl Harbor, are a profile in your local alt-weekly waiting to happen; a pair of very young sisters (Skylar Kaplan is 16, Piper 23) who dropped high school for independent study and rep second-tier shoegaze influences make for pretty easy copy. But who are they exactly? It's a question that largely goes unanswered on their debut LP, Headbangers in Ecstasy, a record whose most distinguishing quality is the fact that it really doesn't have one: Whether you wish to parlay Puro Instinct into a discussion of precocity or whether they're truly about their Russian cultural references ("Stilyagi" loosely translates to "style hunter," or, if you prefer, "hipster"), Headbangers in Ecstasy won't do anything to get in your way.
Despite the chorused guitars and laggard dream-pop tempos, the facile comparison to fellow L.A. labelmates Best Coast are warranted. Like Crazy for You, there's a hovering sense of simplicity and nostalgia that isn't based in a certain era so much as Southern California, an area that produced Ariel Pink and then unsurprisingly had no involvement whatsoever in chillwave. But the contrast is also pointed, since whereas Best Coast indulged in classic formulae aiming for the radio of beachgoers, Headbangers in Ecstasy is made for poolside lounging-- and as attractive as that sounds, its actually the LP's biggest weakness.
This is the sort of music that is best served by immersion, and the songs are stretched too wide and shallow for you to dive in headfirst. It's pointless to argue whether or not the wafer-thin sound was the best production Puro Instinct could afford at the time considering similarly minded documents like Real Estate or even Beach House cunningly flipped their shoestring budgets, turning stray amp buzz, flubbed takes, and shabby mic settings into positive atmospheric contributors. Meanwhile, Headbangers is distractingly fragile: Skylar's arpeggios and soloing have the pinched treble of early Cure but none of its bite; Piper's unhurried deadpan muddles melodies, begging for more harmonies or reverb for support; and you can hear a bass at points, though its presence is all but theoretical. The "KDOD" radio interludes that pop up sporadically throughout Headbangers in Ecstasy attempt to present the record as a wholly conceived musical experience, but they're every bit as good at jolting you out of the torpor caused by dream-pop nodding off.
And that's a shame considering the occasional strength of the Kaplans' songwriting. The choral harmonies of "Lost at Sea" have a squinting beauty to them. Then there's the curiously hyped "Stilyagi", whose swooning chorus lines are proper Stevie Nicks but fittingly the impact of its major talking points are nearly imperceptible-- Ariel Pink's production is detectable only by the credits, and trying to parse the lyrics will most likely confirm that the title was chosen for its implicit coolness rather than its actual meaning.
But the bigger problem is that the second half of Headbangers takes its structural cues from "Stilyagi", nearly every song sleepwalking through non-committal melodies without either much headbanging or ecstasy. Titles like "California Shakedown" and "Luv Goon" exert an aggressiveness that's aspirational at best considering their owners. You can tell by the intentional garishness of that airbrushed cover that Puro Instinct have both the youth and self-awareness for more promising things, but right now Headbangers in Ecstasy is the image's sonic embodiment: pretty, vacant.
