It\u2019s 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 \u2014 even the band\u2019s name could easily be a Pains lyric (actually it\u2019s from a Blonde Redhead song).<\/p>\n
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\u2019t appear to have one. With its EP Paper Crush, LUDGF has crafted five songs as generic as a can labeled \u201cbeans\u201d \u2014 you know what you\u2019re getting but there\u2019s no cause for excitement.<\/p>\n
I can appreciate what Mike Lee, the band\u2019s founding member and lead singer, is trying to do. There\u2019s a fondness for the early 1980s synth bands (New Order, OMD) he\u2019s 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 \u201cRepeating Hearts\u201d drowns guitars on synths on guitars, leaving Lee\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSophia in Gold\u201d is a song you might hear when pressing the demo button on a cheap Casio piano at Best Buy \u2014 the hand clap and vibraphone notes (I think it\u2019s tone 11 on the Casio) at the song\u2019s end is funny in the most tragic of ways. \u201cTeenage Tide\u201d has promise, a nice hook runs through it (save the obvious New Order rip off at song\u2019s end), but lacks the sharpness of a finished product. It too sounds like a demo \u2014 demo Pains would write but never release until cleaned and polished. \u201cI Feel You Happen\u201d is a three-minute mess of layers upon layers, while \u201cAurora\u201d is the backing soundtrack during a music montage in a bad Andrew McCarthy movie (sorry, redundant, they\u2019re all bad). Painful.<\/p>\n
Paper Crush is a 17-minute chore where nothing gets done, making you wish you did something else with your time. I\u2019ll say this much about Lee \u2014 he got the great faults part just right. It might be time to let up and reevaluate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s 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 \u2014 even the band\u2019s name could easily be a Pains lyric (actually it\u2019s from a Blonde Redhead song). Turns out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1413,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[426,427],"class_list":["post-1412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-letting-up-despite-great-faults","tag-paper-crush"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1414,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412\/revisions\/1414"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}