Pugwash’s Thomas Walsh was quoting his mother when he said ‘it’s nice to be nice’ and that seems like the right spirit to round out this year’s blog posts. A little more niceness won’t hurt anybody. Today’s acts are so very nice. Just the kind you could take home to mother.
The Smittens exude everything that people who are not from Burlington Vermont think that town would be about. Quirky free spirits just saying ‘hey, let’s live and let live!’ City Rock Dove is their latest album and it’s a longplaying bit of wonderful, with nearly every track capturing some wistful sentiment or upbeat heartache. I love “Three States,” “Love is a Word,” and, well, just about everything else. Let’s settle on “Season One” as emblematic of their Magnetic Fields meets Simon and Garfunkel brand of eccentric intimacy. Ben Talmi is an indie artist with a long resume of providing musical arrangements and backdrops for others but with Distractionism it really feels like his own artistic vision has come together. His hooky acoustic vibe and soft intimate vocal style reminds of Jeremy Fisher and Paul Simon at times, particularly on tracks like “Life is but a Dream” and “All for You.” But if I have to focus your attention on his unique brilliance, check out the fabulous roll out to “Chances.” You’ll be hooked.
Billy and Dolly have a great 1960s vibe going, with jangly guitars, rumbly organ and melody to spare. But what grabs you are the killer vocal harmonies! On Five Suns the duo rock out the hooks on tracks like “Setting Sun” but you can pretty much sum up the genius here with the gorgeous “Everything is Off.” Textbook should-be hit single. By contrast The Sidekicks somehow manage to make a pretty bleak situation sound totally OK on “Don’t Feel Like Dancing.” Again, some pretty hooky vocals draw the listener in. The singer may not be dancing but we are! “Weed Tent” is another melodic highlight.
Time to activate that nice-ness and visit The Smittens, Ben Talmi, Billy & Dolly, and The Sidekicks online with your cheeriest fistful of music-buying cash. It’s really the nice thing to do.
Christmas music gets a bad wrap (pun intended). Some people seem to think that you can take any old song and throw a seasonal reference in and – voila! – holiday classic. Hardly. Every year an ocean of new Christmas songs hit the holiday beach but few have any staying power. There is something inexplicably magical about the combination of tune, sentiment, and bells that maketh music genuinely seasonal. Kinda like if tinsel and marzipan had a soundtrack. Fortunately, there are a few tunesmiths who still understand how to work the formula, with some of the finest featured here on our now annual holiday music post!
Nine. I don’t why or how I settled on that number but my three previous holiday music posts have all featured nine artists. Weird. Well, I’m not one to needlessly buck tradition so here’s nine more … starting with the amazing Lannie Flowers. Flowers is a longtime veteran of the power pop/indie music scene, charming audiences with his consistently Beatlesque melodic hooks. He returns this year with a remixed version of his 2013 holiday release, “Christmas Without You,” a song that nicely combines jangle with just a hint of country. Next up is a very modern take on seasonal themes, namely, that surely Joseph would have had some doubts about just what was going on with Mary and their miracle baby. Only the New Pornographers could pull off such content and they do on “Joseph, Who Understood,” a new holiday, sing-along classic. Proving their recent comeback Good Times! album was no fluke, the Monkees return this year with a whole album of festive music, with a similar crew of indie pop royalty providing the tunes and musical direction. There’s plenty of good stuff here but “The House of Broken Gingerbread” stands out for me as a superior poprock tune, written by celebrated author Michael Chabon and FOW’s Adam Schlesinger. I’m kinda cheating a bit with this next contribution from Gregory Pepper who just released his holiday-themed four song EP Tsundere. I’m treating his effort like a double-A sided effort, but one with four songs. Pepper’s work sounds deceptively simple but melodically and lyrically he’s a master of so many genre styles and a brilliantly funny and smart lyricist. Spend some time with these tunes. Anybody who can song-check both Macca (“Secret Satan”) and the mopey one (“Home Alone”) knows what he’s doing!
Lannie Flowers – Christmas Without YouThe New Pornographers – Joseph, Who UnderstoodThe Monkees – The House of Broken Gingerbread
Digging a bit deeper into our Christmas music bag, Pugwash prove they are the deserving inheritors of XTC’s brand of hooky, intelligent indie poprock with “Tinsel and Marzipan,” capped with a darling Irish-accented child at the end! Crossing the water to Liverpool Rob Clarke and the Wooltones Mersey up the Christmas music scene with a whole album of festiveness on Bring Me the Wooltones This Year! It’s a very Beatles-ish collection of serious and not so serious contributions, with new songs and old faves. The double-A single for me would be “Another Wooltones Xmas Record/Santa Claus.” It can’t be a Christmas tune-age roundup without a tender ballad of seasonal longing so now we head a bit north to Glasgow to hear from The Pooches and their simple song of needing to be with someone as the yuletide comes, “Christmas, With You.” Both stark and moving. Super poprock stars Fun. haven’t put out much in terms of albums but they did put out a holiday single shortly after their first album. “Believe in Me” bears all the hallmarks of that band’s winning formula: intriguing change ups in the song structure, toy piano solos, and plenty of hooks of course.Pugwash – Tinsel and MarzipanThe Pooches – Christmas (With You)Fun. – Believe in Me
Wrapping up this year’s holiday blog post (literally this time), something more traditional. Well, sort of. Quiet Company love the holidays and we’ve featured their stellar coverage of the traditional canon before. Now they’re back with a timely release that captures the distemper of the times with Baby It’s Cold War Outside. With song titles like “Merry Christmas, The President is Terrible” and “Alone on Christmas (You’re Going to Die)” the sense of seasonal dread really comes through. But the traditional themes of hope are there too with “Little Drummer Boy” and particularly on their original reworking of “Carol of the Bells/Setting the Trap.”
In 1970 Decca put out The World of the Zombies, a compilation that leaned heavily on material from the band’s 1965 English debut, Begin Here, right down to re-using the original cover. My parents bought it and for a time the Zombies were to me as important a part of the 1960s rock and roll cannon as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Rolling Stones. And yet they were different, exuding a stylish, jazz-infused cool all their own, no doubt due to Colin Blunstone’s breathy vocals and Rod Argent’s distinctive keyboards. In my youth I could never understand why they didn’t seem the make the lists of the great bands from the 1960s. Nor have they spawned the revival of interest we’ve seen accorded to other historic bands since then, i.e. in terms of biographies, documentaries or tribute albums. Only Seattle’s indie Popllama label mustered up their roster of bands to celebrate The World of the Zombies in 1994, featuring the Posies, the Young Fresh Fellows and the Fastbacks, among others.
Well, that seems to be changing. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced this fall that the band would be inducted in 2019 and regardless of what you think of that questionable institution, I welcome the attention to a band that has for too long been overlooked. To aid in that process this blog post will celebrate the great songs of the Zombies, as covered by more recent poprock artists. Funny thing though, as I set out to find said covers – from the obvious hits like “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No,” and “Time of the Season,” to less obvious gems like “I Love You,” “Indication,” “The Way I Feel Inside,” “You Make Me Feel Good,” “Kind of Girl,” etc. – I discovered that the band’s material has not been covered that much. I was a bit shocked actually. So many truly great compositions overlooked while people put out yet another Beatles or Dylan cover. Hopefully this recent attention will right that wrong.
Time it was that the choice of an album’s single was both a serious artistic and financial decision. Putting out a single meant committing considerable resources to pressing them up and distributing them to radio stations, reviewers, and nightclubs. Today every cut on an album could theoretically be the single, depending on listener downloads and streams. But artists and record companies do still sometimes make a fuss about ‘the single’ as a way of drawing attention to a soon-to-be-released album. Or just as a way of maintaining interest in the product after its initial drop. For me, the single should be an album’s most potent hook vehicle, the song that will have listeners searching out the record for more. And it’s a way for me to highlight some great songs on the blog that just don’t fit anywhere else!
A new week, a brand new batch of just released tunes from some seriously melodic dudes: Sofa City Sweetheart and Wyatt Blair. When I heard what these guys had on offer, they went right to the front of the blogging queue. Why not start the week off right?
Musical chameleon Wyatt Blair has owned the sounds of so many different musical styles on his previous releases, though they’ve mostly focused on the 1980s. This time Blair steps back a few decades to nail the late 1960s California pop sound on his new record, Inspirational Strawberries. Things kick off with “It’s Yesterday,” a song filled with those classic fun 1960s sounds like harpsichord, bicycle bells and a killer organ, and then layered with some ace Cowsills vocals in the chorus. Next up is the obvious should-be hit single, “Gotta Get Away,” an adrenaline rush of Mamas and the Papas meets the Bryrds power sixties hooks. And Blair just keeps hitting the 1960s melodic marks after that, with some spot on, rocked up Hollies vocals on “Who’s to Blame,” a distinct Abbey Road vibe on “A New Tomorrow,” and some great rumbly lead guitar with Beach Boys vocal stylings on “Tenderly.”
Great music is breaking out all over this year and it’s a race to get them all in the blog before 2018 expires. Today’s crew has textured popcraft, a bit of blasty rock and roll, and even some dance grooves.
Just one listen to Legs & Luggage and there’s little doubt that Vegas with Randolph’s songwriters are conversant with the major melodic rock and roll motifs of the past few decades. They’re effortlessly combined on this album’s 13 winning tracks with a charm reminiscent of a more rough-hewn Fountains of Wayne. Opening track “You Could Say Yes” charges out of the gate with hooks that say radio-friendly hit single. Another single-ish release would be “The Girl Holding Out for Me” with its pure bliss hooky chorus. The album also sees the band vibing a range of influences, from the Plimsouls’ elan of “Jacob” to the chirpy Ben Kweller jaunt of “I Could be the One” to the Steve Miller touches on “The Weekend’s Coming.” And then there’s the wonderful FOW-meets-Partridge Family peppiness of “Women in Airports” and the veritable blueprint of perfect poprock song, “The Comeback Kid.” Forget buying singles, this one’s an album purchase.
Italy is producing an amazing bunch of melodic rockers of late (we featured stellar releases from 
A new record from Greg Pope is poprock money in the bank, he just doesn’t disappoint. I mean, one of his previous releases was aptly-named Popmonster, to which reviewers heartedly agreed – that gives you some idea what a prolific and reliable creative force he is. Now he’s back with A Few Seconds of Fame, which unfortunately could also double as a commentary on his undeservedly cool reception from top 40 radio. I don’t get it – to my ears, they’re all hits! Check the opening track “Forget About You” with its great driving tempo and solid yet subtlely hooky chorus, or the tightly delivered “Retread” – this is what radio-friendly singles used to sound like. But hey, I could just as easily recommend the wonderful 1970s ELO pop sound of “Hopes and Dreams and Fears” or the great late Beatles pop vibe on “Planet Earth” or the textured, layered sound of “Dreams About You,” particularly on the vocals. I guess nobody’s gonna make me a top 40 radio program director anytime soon but if they did …
Portland’s Hemmit have run the gamut of stadium-sounding rawk (ironically delivered, of course) to ‘punkish powerpop’ (in their words) to the electronic pop of their current release. The new EP, One Ultra, definitely channels some great 1980s synth pop influences, obvious on tracks like “Ultraviolet” and “Power” but subtlely lodged in others like “My Room” too. But consistent across their catalogue is the songwriting quality, evident on the obvious singles: the relentlessly driving “Friends” and the more melodic hooks of “Waves.” This is a band worth spending some time digging through various releases for a load of poprock gems.
The Appleton Post-Crescent described Car City as a “Fox Valley supergroup,” a reference to the fact that while all the musicians were long-standing members of the local live music scene they had really only recently come together to work on this project. Their experience clearly mattered because Car City, the album, sounds like the work of a cohesive band. The resulting sound is like Weezer on anti-depressants, a slightly dissonant, melody rich concoction that delivers on Jason Lemke’s great songs. It’s all there on the opening tracks, “Connecting the Dots” and “Like a Wave” with their earworm-worthy yet subtle melodic turns and twists. Then things get really interesting when “Hopeless” breaks out the Aimee Mann syth to good effect with some inspired full stops and background vocals, while “(Don’t) Give Up on Love” kicks off all Beach Boys vocal harmonizing before dusting off Steve Nieve’s organ. And the songs I haven’t mentioned? Also great. Frankly, I love all the tunes on this record. Car City deserves to be in your collection.