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Growing Pains is Kalia Storer (bass/vocals), Carl Taylor (guitar), Jack Havrilla (guitar/vocals) and Kyle Kraft (drums). The members met each other playing covers at the School of Rock in Portland, Oregon when they were 16 and 17; six months later, they were trying out their own material at Portland all-ages mecca Black Water and in basements around the city, quickly turning heads at early shows that, according to more than a few of those in attendance, sounded like “if Mazzy Star were an emo band.” Lesser bands might have been content to stop there, but not Growing Pains. 18 months of house shows and opening slots for buzzing national acts like awakebutstillinbed, Diners and Macseal helped the young act sharpen a sound that could only have emerged from the post-mordial soup of internet-era rock. Sure—listen for the past, and you’ll hear the orchestrated chaos of My Bloody Valentine; the instrumental pyrotechnics and compositional sleights-of-hand that unite Smashing Pumpkins with the mathier end of emo; the patient hookiness common to 80s and 90s dream pop acts and their slowcore contemporaries. But Heaven Spots is no jaded nostalgia revue. It’s an undeniably contemporary record made by people who listen too widely to suffer from the anxiety of specific influences.
- Nathan Tucker
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Growing Pains is Kalia Storer (bass/vocals), Carl Taylor (guitar), Jack Havrilla (guitar/vocals) and Kyle Kraft (drums). The members met each other playing covers at the School of Rock in Portland, Oregon when they were 16 and 17; six months later, they were trying out their own material at Portland all-ages mecca Black Water and in basements around the city, quickly turning heads at early shows that, according to more than a few of those in attendance, sounded like “if Mazzy Star were an emo band.” Lesser bands might have been content to stop there, but not Growing Pains. 18 months of house shows and opening slots for buzzing national acts like awakebutstillinbed, Diners and Macseal helped the young act sharpen a sound that could only have emerged from the post-mordial soup of internet-era rock. Sure—listen for the past, and you’ll hear the orchestrated chaos of My Bloody Valentine; the instrumental pyrotechnics and compositional sleights-of-hand that unite Smashing Pumpkins with the mathier end of emo; the patient hookiness common to 80s and 90s dream pop acts and their slowcore contemporaries. But Heaven Spots is no jaded nostalgia revue. It’s an undeniably contemporary record made by people who listen too widely to suffer from the anxiety of specific influences.
The only band that all four members love is Joyce Manor, and they share with that cult Southern California quartet a knack for casting what could easily be straightforward pop songs in a slightly off-kilter light. The effect isn’t so much to stretch genre as it is to make it irrelevant. You can still call it emo if you want—Growing Pains do. But the band’s omnivorous approach to the last four decades of guitar music renders any conversation about waves, or numbering them, basically pointless: in the seven songs on Heaven Spots, the band’s 2020 debut, the whole ocean hits you at once.
That’s not to say that Growing Pains are unsubtle; in fact, they’re obsessive tinkerers. Novel sonic combinations are inevitable when you’re constantly reworking parts, rewriting lyrics, and subjecting your early drafts to that traditional low-milage road test of young projects, the local house show circuit. The band is quick to note the influence of the Portland underground on their sound, specifically the city’s dense recent history of young people combining the guitar sounds of the 80s and 90s counterculture with the emo that broke through to the mainstream in their early adolescence.
True to form, the first song Growing Pains started writing together was the last they finished for Heaven Spots, and it’s a song that fellow Portland heads will immediately recognize as wearing its Pacific Northwest cred on its sleeve and in its title: “Sancho.” The lyrics were written after Taylor missed a reunion set by the eponymous (and short-lived) band at a beloved (but no longer active) basement spot, and the music is a showcase for everything that Storer, Taylor, Havrilla and Kraft do best. In a sense, it’s hard to think of a more fitting way for these four to celebrate their roots than by referencing a reunion show they missed for a band they were too young to see the first time around. Growing Pains know all about what’s come before them, but by the time you get to the end of Heaven Spots, you’ll know it’s their turn to leave a mark.
- Nathan Tucker