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Brothers John and Frank Navin lead the Aluminum Group through a veritable delight of summery pop music on Plano, named after a small town outside of Chicago. The Aluminum Group’s sound is reminiscent of the cocktail lounge of Holiday and the Divine Comedy and the delicious hooks are on par with the brilliant Pale Fountains. “A Boy in Love” is one of the year’s most perfect pop songs, with an instantly memorable chorus, but then I could say that about almost any of these songs. Plano also features unusually strong lyrics about relationships that are both clever and tell compelling stories. This is complex, thinking-person’s pop music that no fan of the Beautiful South or the Divine Comedy should miss.

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Sarah Zupko is a former Executive Producer at Tribune Media Services, the media syndication arm of the Tribune Company, and a 10-year veteran of Tribune Company. Aside from writing novels and plays, she devotes most of her time and energy to running PopMatters.com and formerly PopCultures.com, as well as research in the fields of Slavic and German history, and general European cultural and intellectual history. Zupko studied musicology, film, and drama at the University of Chicago and media theory at the University of Texas, where she received her M.A. in 1995.


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9 Apr 2008
Chicago lounge-pop vets John and Frank Navin deliver plenty of cool, but not enough feeling, on their sixth album.
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