It’s not a stretch to believe Letting Up Despite Great Faults is a tribute band honoring The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. The sweet and soothing vocals, the shoegaze guitar textures, the dream-pop synths — even the band’s name could easily be a Pains lyric (actually it’s from a Blonde Redhead song).
Turns out Letting Up is not an homage to POBPAH but instead a band seeking to forge its own identity, which becomes problematic because it doesn’t appear to have one. With its EP Paper Crush, LUDGF has crafted five songs as generic as a can labeled “beans” — you know what you’re getting but there’s no cause for excitement.
I can appreciate what Mike Lee, the band’s founding member and lead singer, is trying to do. There’s a fondness for the early 1980s synth bands (New Order, OMD) he’s trying to replicate, but too often his songs become a jumble of sounds battling for twee supremacy, overwhelming his voice to the point of irrelevance. This is apparent from the get-go, as “Repeating Hearts” drowns guitars on synths on guitars, leaving Lee’s lyrics in a sea of garble. I thought the whole point of shoegaze twee was to hear lyrics about straining breakdowns, not breaking down to hear straining lyrics.
“Sophia in Gold” is a song you might hear when pressing the demo button on a cheap Casio piano at Best Buy — the hand clap and vibraphone notes (I think it’s tone 11 on the Casio) at the song’s end is funny in the most tragic of ways. “Teenage Tide” has promise, a nice hook runs through it (save the obvious New Order rip off at song’s end), but lacks the sharpness of a finished product. It too sounds like a demo — demo Pains would write but never release until cleaned and polished. “I Feel You Happen” is a three-minute mess of layers upon layers, while “Aurora” is the backing soundtrack during a music montage in a bad Andrew McCarthy movie (sorry, redundant, they’re all bad). Painful.
Paper Crush is a 17-minute chore where nothing gets done, making you wish you did something else with your time. I’ll say this much about Lee — he got the great faults part just right. It might be time to let up and reevaluate.
