The self-titled debut from young New York foursome The Pains of Being Pure at Heart came out last month and somehow passed me by. This despite every indication that I would fall completely in love with the band—the precious, overly wordy name (from an unpublished children's story!), the fact that they're released on ace label Slumberland Records, the Smiths-meets-Cometbus album art. And, of course, the record is fantastic. It's perfectly realized indie-pop revivalism—the kind of stuff that, along with Vivian Girls and the rest of the current Slumberland roster, has had me using terms like "twee," "dream-pop," and "jangly" way too much and with maybe too much enthusiasm in the past year. I can't help it, though; too young to catch the first go-round of this stuff, introduced to it after the fact via '90s hold-outs Heavenly, I've been waiting for this sound to reach a revival for years. And it's finally here.

So, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is ten tracks clocking in at a perfect 35 minutes (ie, an ideal average of 3:30 per), with titles like "Young Adult Friction," "This Love is Fucking Right!" (exclamation theirs), and "A Teenager in Love." Their songs are populated by soft, starry-eyed, misfit youths, indiscrete professors, and sleepy-headed lovers, all done up in alternately blurry and pinpoint portraiture (ie, the vague feelings of "Stay Alive" versus the sensory details of "Young Adult Friction": a "worn sweatshirt," "the dust and the microfiche" between the library stacks, "taking toffee with your vicodin").

Guitarist Kip Berman and keyboardist Peggy Wang provide male/female vocals so similarly fey and fainting as to be almost indistinguishable (in the best possible way), although Berman's singing does most of the work. He lays down just the slightest blanket of feedback under his strummed acoustic and electric guitars, which range from purely clean to just-so fuzzy to the occasional full-on wall of still careful reverb and distortion (as on final track "Gentle Sons"). Wang's softened keyboard/organ trills lend the songs bright undertones, occasionally straying just a bit into glassy '80s new wave sounds (the opening keys of both "Young Adult Friction" and the naggingly familiar "A Teenager in Love"). Alex Naidus' bass lines are nimble and bouyant; drummer Kurt Feldman's rhythms vary from up-tempo snare-rolling racket to as little as the steady lackadaisical shake of a tambourine, given the demands of the songs.

The album is stuffed with great songs, but my favorites right now are the ebullient, daydreaming "Come Saturday," the flirty "Young Adult Friction," the Vaselines-lite "This Love is Fucking Right!," and the lazy, cloud-gazing entreaty "Stay Alive." If we have any luck at all (and I have reason to believe we do), this band will be playing here in Seattle come summertime.