Yeah, so there’s that saying, “It’s all Greek to me,” but here that stops with the title. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s “Eurydice,” like the newest Arcade Fire album, refers to a classical myth about a great musician who nevertheless fails to save his dead wife from the Underworld. The latest track from the New York dream-pop shimmerers’ May 13 album Days of Abandon, though — like previously shared triumph “Simple and Sure” — is, well, actually simple and sure, a sweetly tuneful gallop across themes of heartbreak and loss. “This album was a chance to step back from that universal style of songwriting to something that was far more personal, more in keeping with my original ideals,” frontman Kip Berman has said of the follow-up to 2011’s Belong, but these rafter-reaching hooks are just another indication of how the personal can sometimes also be the universal. Maybe it’s sort of like how each generation over the centuries had its own take on the Parthenon in Athens, and the Greeks’ own mythology was influenced by the Epic of Gilgamesh, and, and — “Losing you, losing you,” that chorus rings out again, okay, and somehow it all makes sense.
