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.”
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!
Time to get your jangle on – it’s jangle Thursday! Why Thursday? I don’t know. Maybe people just need a bit of sparkle to carry them through to the weekend. This installment takes a broad view of what jangles, not limiting the pool to just the Rickenbacker electric 12 string crew (not that there’s anything wrong with them …).
One way to get caught up on the amazing onslaught of music coming out is to let someone else do the sorting. Compilation records emerged almost simultaneously with advent of the long playing ‘LP’ in the 1950s, offering music consumers a load of hits or exposure to new artists at bargain prices. Of course, groove-cramming 20 artists on a single album did come at a cost – these were not ‘high fidelity’ releases! But I certainly recall hearing a lot of acts via such releases that I might not have discovered. Today digital compilation albums don’t suffer poor sound quality and once again serve to introduce audiences to broad genres of music – and power pop and poprock are no exceptions. While every track may not be winner on your garden variety compilation album, our three examples come pretty close!
Wayne Lundquist Ford is the ‘Ice Cream Man,’ a UK expat living in Sweden and producing a regular radio show that combines sixties retro classics with new material that runs the full gamut of power pop and then some. Ford’s particular blend combines garage rock with some surf rumble and straight up power pop. Songs We Learned in Sundae School is a monster collection of 163 tunes, all available for free download from the Futureman 
Reverse Play: C86 Rediscovered sees a variety of bands reinterpret the New Music Express cassette of indie pop tunes from 1986 that featured Primal Scream, The Primitives and The Pastels, among others. Some tracks have a decidedly shoegaze gloss to them while others sound like more polished or alternate takes of the originals. On the whole, it’s a pretty solid tribute/homage to the original record. But, if I have to choose, the standout tracks for me would be “Emma’s House,” from the incomparable The Catherines, the janglicious “Kill, Kill, Kill” by The Death of Pop, and Ed Ling’s beautiful acoustic rendition of “Velocity Girl.”
David Bash is a power pop institution, hosting live showcases of new talent in countless cities on two continents – every year! His insatiable appetite for hooks and keen ear for up and coming talent is apparent on his most recent multi-CD compilation, International Pop Overthrow 21. This collection features power pop defined in the most broad and inclusive terms (as it should be). Of the 69 featured songs, we’ve also highlighted 8 on Poprock Record, so clearly I’ve missed a lot of good stuff! As there’s too much here to review in detail, I’ll just whet your appetite with a few standout tracks, IMHO.
This blog is really one long testimonial to the Beatles’ influence on all sorts of popular music, past and definitely present. Indeed, my shorthand for describing what I do here to any random person is to say the blog features new music that builds on the legacy of the Fab Four. Today we attend to that influence more directly with bands that wear their Beatles love on their sleeves. Sometimes it’s the sound, other times it’s the subject matter, or it can just be an inspired cover.
All the power pop blogs are talking at me. I don’t hear every word they’re saying but it’s hard not to catch the drift. They’re pretty bonkers over this crew of performers and for good reason. They pop rock! Today I play catch up on some pretty superior tune-age. What’s fun in the ever-so-slightly competitive world of blogging is seeing who puts up what and when. Early adopters are cool! But even when we post the same things – and why not? It’s all about supporting the music – it’s fun to notice how we don’t necessarily highlight the same songs. Here I’ve tried to shine a light on some different cuts from these new albums.
Is it a turn down day? No, it’s jangle Thursday. A day ripe with the ringing chime of trebly, echo-y guitars that somehow say sunshine and good times. I say confidently that today’s trio of tunes will elevate your mood and contribute to overall feelings of good fellowship. Let the jangle rip!
A new feature of sorts, a tribute to the almighty single! In this age of catastrophic change in music consumption the single is back as a way of teasing interest in an artist and their new releases. It is now fairly conventional for artists to release a single well ahead of the album. Take this first round of singles – all precede their designated albums by many months. And, frankly, I can’t wait around to feature these talents!
Time it was that I waited on every Elvis Costello release like the second coming of rock and roll’s savior. And then post-Spike, I got a bit more choosy. I mean, I totally support artists going beyond whatever they’ve done in the past and Elvis clearly had many more roads left to explore. They just weren’t always my thing. But like every George Jones record, there’s seldom lacking at least one truly great cut on any given EC album. It looks like Costello’s to-be-released new album will be no exception. “Unwanted Number” is a pre-release cut from Look Now and it’s a winner. Think Imperial Bedroom meets Painted From Memory. The piano and songwriting are reminiscent of the songs from that great Costello keyboard period stretching from Imperial Bedroom through Punch the Clock and Goodbye Cruel World. Meanwhile the bridge captures the feel of the work he did with Burt Bacharach on songs like “Toledo.”
Next up is the criminally under-appreciated Paul Collins, veteran of so many great acts like the Nerves, the Breakaways, and, of course, the Paul Collins Beat. What is striking about Collins is the quality of his songwriting output over a four-decade period. His new single shows he’s still got it. “In and Out of My Head” is the pre-release single from his upcoming album, Out of My Head. The rumbly guitar is wonderfully retro yet freshly deployed on a tune that sounds like it belongs on a Roy Orbison album.
Described as “Califorian pop from sunny Utrech, the Netherlands” on their website, The Maureens have a keen ear for a melodic blend of country folk and poprock sounds. 2015’s Bang the Drum was a solid release, oozing hooks and harmonies. Now they’ve released “20 Years for the Company” from the to-be-released Something in the Air and it’s a blast of harmony-drenched goodness. Speaking to the economic insecurity of times, the song nonetheless gives off a positive vibe with it’s captivating mix of male and female vocals.
It’s a man’s, man’s, man’s, man’s world they tell us and nowhere is that more true than in rock and roll. The omniscient perspective in a rock song is usually male, with a few exceptions. But to the music scene’s credit, more women have been making inroads over the past two decades or so. The first woman I recall identifying not simply as a ‘female vocalist’ but as a universal rock voice was Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. Since then the indie scene has provided us with a number of examples of larger than life female artists (they have to be to crowd out the men) with great songs and powerful performances.
Jill Sobule has had an amazing career doing, apparently, pretty much whatever she has wanted to do. After a false start at Geffen in 1990, 1995’s self-titled Jill Sobule set the frame for what would follow: a quirky, often folky, sometimes hilarious, always introspective and keenly observational singer-songwriter that has consistently produced great albums. Kinda like a rock and roll Suzanne Vega, but with more ‘tude. Threaded throughout her work is a strong set of political and feminist commitments, ranging from the satirical “Supermodel” to the more recent “Women of Industry.” Sobule’s catalogue is an embarrassment of riches so here’s an almost random selection. “Supermodel” showcases the uptempo hit songwriter, “Bitter” from 1997’s Happy Town rides a perfect hook, “Rock Me to Sleep” from 2000’s Pink Pearl exemplifies her tender side, while the banjo-driven “Old Kentucky” from 2014’s Dottie’s Charms is just a bit of rollicking fun. Sobule is working on a new album now and you check out her Soundcloud 
There are times when Amy Rigby seems so country. It’s there in her voice, that weary 1960s sound of oppressed Nashville womenhood. But then the angle shifts and the rock and roll dynamo shows through, giving voice to a whole lot of gendered working class experience from a lifetime of surviving the independent music scene. Her 1996 solo debut Diary of a Mod Housewife was a masterpiece of melodic social commentary but it didn’t lead to explosive sales. Since then, Rigby has continued to release solid records with songs that draw on all manner of classic rock and roll motifs, while giving voice to issues of class, relationships, gender and aging. A good place to start would be her 2002 compilation 18 Again. There you can check out the perfect 1960s elan of “All I Want” or the new wave vibe to “The Good Girls” or the masterful turns of phrase on the acoustic “Magicians.” Of course, I would add a few songs from 2003’s Til the Wheels Fall Off like the age-conscious “Shopping Around” or “Last Request” as well as 2005’s Little Fugitive,which contains a host of beautiful song scenarios like “The Trouble with Jeanie” and “Dancing with Joey Ramone.” She is back this year with Old Guys, where I’m digging “Are We Still There Yet.”
So much has been written about Juliana Hatfield and her many impressive accomplishments, all the great bands she has been part of, there’s really not much I could add. So I’ll just focus my attention on her continuing strength as a songwriter and recording artist. After a break of 22 years, her reunited Juliana Hatfield Three released a killer album in 2015, Whatever, My Love, with radio-friendly single material like “Invisible” and “If I Could.” Deep cut fave – “Parking Lots” with it’s sunny subtle hooks. Then in 2017 she released the dynamite, politically-charged solo album, Pussycat, a reaction to the election of Donald Trump. Here I would single out the jaunty “You’re Breaking my Heart” and “Kellyanne.” Then, as a reaction to the previous election year’s constant negativity, Hatfield decided to release an album of Olivia Newton-John covers. Here she works a creative tension between mirroring and reinventing the originals, with particular success on the Xanadu sountrack numbers, in my view. “Magic” amps up the early 1980s keyboard sound and adds Hatfield’s own distinctive vocal approach. Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John is better than cover albums are allowed to be, a real treat.
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