As we travel around the dial today we explore bands that are established but not necessarily wildly successful along with others that are just getting started.
I stumbled across Ginger Wildeheart quite recently and quickly found myself wondering how I hadn’t heard of him before. This guy oozes talent. Whatever style he turns to, he masters. Whatever hook he is crafting, he nails it. He has so many bands and recordings, it is going to take me some time just get through them all. So today we’ll just feature this recent bit of ear candy, his 2016 single “If You Find Yourself in London Town.” Deceptively sweet sounding, the single is peppered with a hint of menace, kinda like a Mike Leigh film. Ok, I can’t resist, I have to include one more great tune, this time from one of Ginger’s many side projects, Hey! Hello!, a concentrated piece of rock pop entitled “Swimwear.”
I loved Sunday Sun from the first time I heard the opening refrains of their Beatlesque “Beating Low” from the 2012 EP Iii. The combination of carefully constructed vocal harmonies over jangly guitars was a formula that couldn’t lose for me. Their most recent long player Live Out Loud accents the pop over the rock effectively rebalancing their sound away from their earlier work. Would I have preferred some more prominent Rickenbacker guitar lines here and there? Sure. But the band write such catchy and clever songs and the vocals are so impressive, what you have here is still pretty awesome. “When We Kiss” is relentless in its hooky delivery, “Can’t Stop” has a great swing, “Marry You” is a lovely acoustic number just in time for the wedding season, and “Oh Let Me Love You” could easily be a super Hall and Oates single.
When We KissMarry YouOh Let Me Love You
From the opening of Umm’s “Black Summer” you wouldn’t think they would get past the censors on this blog. But just wait for the vocals. This duo enjoy an eerie symbiosis vocally that is enthralling (and the cool organ runs don’t hurt either). Couple Chris Senseney and Stefanie Drootin had a band called Big Harp that had a nice folky/synthy thing going (check out “Golden Age” below for a taste) but in a recent interview noted they were grooving a lot on the Everly Brothers’ harmonies and knew they needed a new vehicle to take up this direction. The result is Umm, a kind of Everly Brothers on acid, though they also remind me of a lot of other great duos out now, many that we’ve reviewed here like the amazing Jack and Eliza or The Kickstand Band. Check out their super video for “Oh Yes No” featuring Creative Commons film footage from “Westinghouse Traveler’s Choice 66” from the Prelinger Archives.
Mystery be thy name, Spirit Kid. There is not a lot to find about this act other than their many great recordings. Spirit Kid is the name of the band and their first album from 2010, which features two strong tracks in “My Imagination” and “Assumed by You.” “Wrong Kind of Money” from the same year is pretty good too. 2011 saw a strong EP with Happiness where the band sound really gels into an Apples in Stereo groove. Is Happening came out in 2014 with “Playing Cupid” and “Heart Attack” but then there is a break until this year’s “To My Romeo.” Easy going and poppy, with just a hint of T Rex and the British glam sound. Love the cover art on the most recent single as well – very fun!
Long Dream is the most recent album from Title Tracks, a band with dreamy sound, vocals that remind me of The Smithereens at times, with some very cool guitar lead lines. “I Don’t Need to Know” bolts out of the pen in a very Bob Mould style, with some cool breakout lead guitar. “Empty Heavens” has a more languid strummy feel with the treble significantly upped on the lead guitar. “Peaceful Uses” has a nice instrumental roll out before settling into a catchy indie poprock vibe. Given how solid this record is, I look forward to mining their back catalogue more carefully.
Visiting Ginger Wildeheart, Sunday Sun, Umm, Spirit Kid, and Title Tracks online has never been easier. Just click on the links.
It was 1982. I was 17, gay as springtime, and loved rock and roll. Musically at that time I would find myself caught between different worlds – there really wasn’t any place to call home. That same year a friend of mine and I snuck into our first gay bar. I thought it was going to be great, to finally be somewhere full of other gay people. But I just couldn’t get past the terrible music. It was all tuneless dance beats, nary a guitar or a melodic hook in sight. I thought of myself as pretty well informed about all kinds of music even then but all night I didn’t recognize a single song. Years later I would come to appreciate why gay popular culture had evolved as it had, why a certain kind of music dominated the scene then. But at the time I experienced it as incredibly alienating. Just another place I didn’t fit in.
And then came The Smiths. There may have been acts that I liked more at the time but none affected me as profoundly as this Manchester quartet. I found a copy of “What Difference Does it Make” in the discard pile at my radio broadcasting school and it blew my head off. The guitar hook immediately had my full attention but the lyrics were also startling – this was my life in a rock and roll song, something that had never happened before. I immediately set out to find more and picked up the BBC sessions/compilation album Hatful of Hollow. The fall of 1984 was all Smiths, all the time. The songs were so obviously about working class gay experience – “William, It Was Really Nothing,” “This Charming Man,” “Handsome Devil,” etc. – that it was painfully embarrassing to see Morrissey equivocate about his sexuality in later interviews. British artists in the 1980s seemed divided about taking a stand on gay identity with Morrissey and the Pet Shops Boys avoiding the issue while others like Bronksi Beat wrote powerfully direct songs like “Small Town Boy.” Later Smiths albums were definitely more oblique about sexuality, but it didn’t matter. The early recordings broke through a barrier of rock and roll masculinity, proving to be as exciting as any previous three chord wonder. Others would take note.
Many years later a 
With seven albums of original material there is simply too much to review here but I could easily single out a host of songs from across their catalogue. From the early period I would note the above-mentioned songs from Undressed, “Don’t Be So Sure” and “Kevin” from 1996’s Wish I’d Taken Pictures, and “Sweet Insecurity” and “Used to Turn Me On” from 1998’s Absurd Pop Song Romance. The band branches out stylistically in the new century with some new guitar sounds and song structures. 2003’s Total Entertainment comes on like a rush of adrenaline with a new sonic mix on tracks like “When He Comes Home,” “Not Good Enough for You,” and “First Betrayal,” while 2009’s That’s So Gay pumps the politics quotient on “Some of My Best Friends” and the ‘not taking ourselves too seriously’ factor on “Dirty Young Man” and “Pat Me on the Ass.” 2016’s Quite Contrary album mimics the cover of their Wish I’d Taken Pictures record released twenty years earlier, replacing the strapping lads of the original with the band’s now aging selves, though they still seem to be cavorting and having a good time. The song themes too reflect their present gay circumstances with issues like the ongoing religious attacks on queers in the US in “Blame the Bible” or aging in “(Is This What It’s Like) Getting Old.” Being from Canada, I have to high five Pansy Division’s ode to our great white north, “Manada” which manages to name check a host of Canadian cities and laud out boys, with versions in both English and French! These guys are a class act.
In the end, the question remains: is it really that important whether a band is gay or not? Yes and no. As I’ve grown older, more comfortable and confident about who I am, I don’t necessarily need to be surrounded by reflections of myself. I love all kinds of music regardless of sexuality or any other kinds of identity markings. But when we are young it is terribly important to see ourselves in popular culture. To be invisible in the world is to be invisible to ourselves. To have our hopes and dreams, heartaches and disappointments given expression in culture is to be part of the broader world. Indeed, to identify across our differences requires first that those differences be articulated. Perhaps it is easier for a rock and roll gay boy today. I hope so, though we should never underestimate how hard it is to be different. Despite the gains in social tolerance, western societies remain profoundly conformist in a host of ways.
Dan Rico is back with Nobody Knows, proving with this dynamic 11 minute EP that he is much more than a one album wonder. The familiar elements are all there – the neo-1970s pastiche of glam and 1950s rock and roll – with a few new twists. Opening track “Love in Vain” gets the party started with its insistent boogie beat but Rico blows the doors off with a killer hook at the 40 second mark that will have you hitting rewind almost immediately. “Nobody Knows” captures that border line 1970s punk-cum-garage rock sound with a nice guitar line. Rounding out the EP is “Rock-a-bye” with its hints of pop psychedelia and the mild melodrama of “Roxy Goddamn.”
Coventry’s The Primitives also have a new EP out, New Thrills, and from the opening riff of “I’ll Trust the Wind” you know you’re about to get just what you came for: catchy melodies, ringing guitars, and Tracy Tracy’s cool but understated pop vocals. All four tracks are the high quality 1960s-inspired poprock fare you’ve come to expect from this combo but check out the distinctive echo-y guitar sound and hooks on “Same Stuff” and lead guitarist Paul Court’s nice vocal turn on the chirpy “Oh Honey Sweet.” I could write and write about how great this band is but, really, it’s all there in the recordings. Just hit play.
On the new discovery front, Richard Turgeon is a modern everyman: successful purveyor of image and communication skills, music business ‘how to’ book writer, novelist, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter, as well as suburban husband and father. He put together his latest record, Between the Spaces, literally between the spaces of his busy work and home life, ‘mostly on nights and weekends’ as he says on his website. The album kicks off with the very fun “Bigfoot’s an Alien” but really gets into gear for me with pristine poprock of “Bad Seed,” a driving number that reminds me of Matthew Sweet. “I Don’t Need You” opens with a great guitar hook and has a super sing-a-long chorus. The whole album is pretty solid, full of well-crafted tunes but, if pressed, I find myself most partial to the above-mentioned selections as well as “Watch Me Now” and “Frostbites.”
Our last breaking new discovery is Cait Brennan. New to me, it appears, because there is a hell of lot written about her first record and unusual career path on the ole internet (thanks to 
What is it with guys and record collections? While I think things have changed a bit recently, coming of age in the 1980s the record store and music obsessions were predominantly male preserves. Nobody captured it better than Nick Hornby in the first chapter of High Fidelity, which opens with the male protagonist deciding for the umpteenth time to reorganize his record collection, this time in the order he purchased them. I remember looking up from the book thinking ‘somebody’s been watching me …’
So here are two songs that capture the traditional range of views about women and record collections. In one, the singer is delighted to find a girl with a serious record collection, noting she “blew me away, with her 45s, they’re all alphabetized …” But in the other, the narrator “did a quick inspection and found [her] ELO” and dumps her, directing her to “take your record collection and go.” In either case, the serious female record collector is either a surprise or unthinkable. Yet both songwriters are clearly mocking this sort of narrow thinking. 
Eytan Mirsky has a large body of hilarious, self-mocking poprock. One album features a pathetic looking Mirsky slouching in a chair as some girlfriend’s luggage is heading for the door – the album title? Was it Something I Said? On his song “Record Collection” (from Get Ready for Eytan!) the shallowness of his male narrator deciding to dump the girl he’s moved in with over some supposed musical indiscretions is both mocked and yet somehow also sadly believable. Meanwhile, producer extraordinaire Fernando Perdomo offers up two distinctly different versions of his charming “Girl with a Record Collection,” one leaning on a jangle poprock sound while the other exploits a more poppy arrangement.
In the early 1980s I went to see Gerry and the Pacemakers play at the International Plaza Hotel in North Vancouver. It was a small room but Gerry was larger than life and clearly a few decades older than his replacement Pacemakers. He belted out his early 1960s hits and closed the show with a version of then chart-topping Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello.” Gerry was a great showman but I left feeling a bit sad. Was this the unavoidable fate of every one-time hit maker? Recycling their past night after night? The good news is, no. Some artists manage to find new inspiration and keep on producing exciting new music.
A while back we featured the criminally overlooked 
The Empty Hearts draw more broadly for their resurrected super-group, including former members of Blondie, the Cars, the Romantics and the Chesterfield Kings. Former Romantics lead singer Wally Palmar gives the group a distinctive vocal stamp, aided by new wave producer Ed Stasium’s crisp production. “I Don’t Want Your Love” is a fun sing-a-long shouter, one of a number of rock and roll workouts on the record, while “(I See) No Way Out” sounds like a great lost Romantics single. But the musical highlight for me is the stunning “Fill an Empty Heart,” a killer tune arranged to hit all the poprock marks – love the organ (courtesy the Faces’ Ian MacLagan) and oh-so-new wave guitars. The album has many highlights but check out “Perfect World” and the country-ish “I Found You Again.”Fill an Empty HeartI Found You Again
Rock and roll has always been a young man’s game but just how young? When the Beatles hit it big in 1963 John, Paul, George and Ringo were 23, 21, 20 and 23 respectively. This week’s duo first made the live music scene when they were barely in their teens. Ok, novelty aside, the real test is the music and these two prove you don’t need quite so many trips around the sun to produce some killer poprock.
Matt Jaffe picked up the guitar at ten and hit his first open mike at 11. At 14 the Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison offered to record some demos with him. His first publicly available material starts to emerge when he is 16, with his first EP out while he is still 19. His band are the Distractions, a play on one of his favourite influences, Elvis Costello and his Attractions. I’m pretty sure Jaffe’s electric guitar is the same as EC’s: a Fender Jazz Master. The not-so-raw talent is obvious from the earliest recordings like “No Place to Go” and “Armistice Day” and on unreleased recordings like “Plastic Tears.” But his first official EP, Blast Off, seals the deal with its effortless mix of rootsy rock and roll like “Write a Song About Me” and “Blast Off” as well as more poprock numbers like “Holding On” and “Stoned on Easter.” “Holding On” particularly has all the right hooky moves, sounding like a slightly off-kilter Marshall Crenshaw single. In 2016 he released another strong single with “Overboard” and followed that this year with his first long player, California’s Burning, which tipped things back toward his more rootsy roots. Check out the swinging “Love is Just a Drug.”
Wunderkind number two seems even more ambitious. 16 year old Max Bouratoglou has just released a new album, the very polished sounding Idle Intuition, produced by Ken Stringfellow of the Posies. But hey, it’s his third album. Max recorded his first record, Mid-Teen Crisis, when he was just 14 in the summer between the 8th and 9th grade. The songs on this first record all start sounding a bit raw but when they kick into the chorus – bang – it’s there, something smooth and hooky. “How to Say” does this with great vocal harmonies in the chorus and some really cool 1960s organ and electric guitar. Clearly, somebody has been raiding the grandparents’ record collection! A year later he released Average Euphonies which upped the production values and the songwriting sophistication on tracks like “Things Have Changed” and “Diamond Pearl,” the latter channeling the 1960s poprock sound of the Monkees and a surprising (and very cool) trumpet solo. On the new album, I’m partial to “Time Flies” and the hypnotic “Drum,” with its super rumbly electric guitar.
I wonder sometimes if the mail person has mistaken my address for Quality Street because the submissions arriving in the Poprock Record mailbag have been pretty spectacular. This week’s selections run the gamut of cabaret pop, textured top 40, straight up party rock and roll, and punky riffsters.
The tuneful Adam Merrin (we featured him 
The new record from Tiny Animals comes a long six years after their last long player. To make up for lost time, they have crafted a full blown concept album, Such Stuff That Dreams Are Made On, that takes us through a night of dreaming and the bleary, sometimes nonsensical imagery that accompanies sleep (or the lack thereof). As with previous Tiny Animals albums, the sound is crisp and finely textured, often built up layer by sonic layer. The songs are sequenced seamlessly without break but some contributions are more single-ready (some more experimental) than others. I would send radio “She’s Gonna Find Out” with its quirky and catchy opener, the hooky “Stalker” which features some great vocal effects, the strolling-on-a-sunny-day “Wait, Wait, Wait,” and the band’s own choice for first release and video, “Up, Up, and Away.” And in something totally unrelated to this release, check out the band’s hilarious medley of 1980s sitcom theme songs!She’s Gonna Find OutUp, Up, and Away
The Popravinas have a easygoing, melodic rock n’ roll sound – they perform like they’ve been playing together forever. Their sound combines both acoustic and electric guitars, punchy lead lines, AM transistored vocals, a bit of California country rock at times, and a general party vibe. The whole album is enjoyable but “Santa Monica Moon,” “Wow,” and “Top of the Heartache” are stand out tracks for me. Still, if I had pick something for a single I think I’d go with “Alone Ain’t So Bad” with its slightly stronger edge of rock and roll insurgency, nice vocal arrangement, and just a bit of banjo. Hit play and let the beer flow.
We torque up the rock quotient with selections from Picnic Tool’s tart and saucy EP Einstein. The title track is a talky, rumbly rock workout full of hilarious asides, while “Chinese Heart” has a more spare sound, held together by a strong, hooky lead guitar line. By comparison “I Love the Truth” sounds more conventional if only because it features actual singing along with some nice harmonica breaks, built on a great neo-1950s music bed. Things wrap up with the fun “… About Gurls,” a crisp new wavey number full of super riffs. And then, it’s over. Even for an EP Einstein ends all too soon.
Dramatic, almost Queen-like in its changes and intensity, V Sparks grabs you and doesn’t let go on its New Sensation EP. While the record has a number of strong songs, I remain most captivated by “Death of a Star.” From the opening keyboards, the song twists and turns so often you may feel it has lost its way. But when it hits the chorus you’re in a melodic sweet spot that you just don’t want to end. A remarkable effort that makes you wonder where this band will go next.
Poprock Record 