A whole lot of life happened to the Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s Kip Berman in the run-up to his fourth LP, The Echo of Pleasure. He got married in 2014, shortly after the release of that year’s Days of Abandon. And much of Pleasure was recorded just at the onset of Berman’s wife’s third trimester, the point at which shit tends to get particularly real. From the initial rush to the all-too-familiar crash, the Pains have spent the better part of a decade charting the highs and lows of young love. But Berman, like many of us, isn’t quite so young anymore. What happens when all the love in your life is no longer as fleeting as a three-minute pop tune? Echo of Pleasure tries to get to the heart of the matter.
Helmed again by Days of Abandon producer Andy Savours, Echo of Pleasure is largely a Berman solo joint. As on Abandon, the great Jen Goma of A Sunny Day in Glasgow is Berman’s closest foil, providing the prismatic backing harmonies and taking another star turn at lead on glimmering late-LP highlight “So True.” The sound of Pleasure is a click or two lusher and more grandiose than the simple and sure hand Savours brought to Abandon. Berman and Savours weave twinkling keyboards and some surprisingly slippery drumwork into an iridescent, instantly familiar synth pop that trades the relative economy of Abandon for a decked out Sadie Hawkins dance dazzle. While a couple new wrinkles have emerged—“The Garret” rides a buckled groove that shares more than a little something with early R.E.M.—Pleasure largely drapes the rippling Johnny Marr-isms of Abandon in a bevy of Psychedelic Furs, a meticulous, bigger-ticket sound that pushes Berman ever further from the bedroom-born urgency of his earliest work.
Playing spot-the-influence here has lost some of the luster it’s had in the past. Berman’s not only swapped out his earlier, geekier forebears for more perennial favorites—less Bunnygrunt, more Bunnymen—but his songwriting has calcified to the point where, no matter how many keyboards he layers on, he mostly sounds like himself. In many ways, he’s a changed man on Pleasure: less concerned with the things he doesn’t have, more concerned with holding onto the things he does, or soon will. The ineffable combo of anxiety and joy that accompanies late-stage pregnancy is written directly into the DNA of these tunes.
Berman has never been one to telegraph his every move. Lyrically, he opts instead for a kind of emotional skywriting, drawing out feelings big enough to cover just about everybody. But these songs are devotionals, re-dedications to something larger than himself. Berman retains a flair for the dramatic—“I wanted to die with you” is a fairly typical chorus—but there’s a longview here that’s a very different look from the pie-eyed, gin-soaked kid chronicling all that young adult friction.
While each Pains album has seen a fairly seismic shift in sound—from the blush-of-youth urgency of their debut to the towering bubblegrunge of Belong—Berman’s way with melody hasn’t changed much. The guy’s always known just how to punch up a chorus, how to deck out an instrumental coda, the kind of songwriting nuts’n’bolts plenty of his peers never quite mastered. Pleasure lays the extended outros, glowing keyboards, and intricate background harmonies on fairly thick, but the song pretty much remains the same. Among all these gleaming exteriors, Berman occasionally loses something in the glare; overlong and sickly sweet, mid-LP trifle “When I Dance With You” is the record’s only real stinker. Pleasure’s onslaught of surface pleasures aren’t quite enough to fully rescue the title track from its laborious chorus, or to pull “The Cure for Death” from its warmed-over you-know-who worship.
Echo of Pleasure could be the last Pains LP; Berman wasn’t even sure he’d get this one in the can. If Abandon was the sound of a young man in flux, then Pleasure is the sound of settling. Maybe Berman’s got a mid-fatherhood return like Double Fantasy in him some years down the road, when his kid’s a little older, and they can look back at this album and be proud of what they made together.
