Little Realities: Flat Mary Road’s Power Pop Breakthrough
Flat Mary Road break through with Little Realities and deliver jangly, hook-laden power-pop with a touch of Harry Chapin thrown in for good measure.
Flat Mary Road break through with Little Realities and deliver jangly, hook-laden power-pop with a touch of Harry Chapin thrown in for good measure.
The sophistication of Charlie Kaplan’s gorgeous LP is impressive and a reminder that sometimes the simplest, sincere gestures are the warmest and longest-lasting.
The simple joys of writing songs and sharing them remain the driving forces for indie pop veterans Teenage Fanclub. Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley discuss.
Mississippi husband-and-wife duo Bark offer up power pop filtered through a hazy lens of distortion on Loud, their most fully realized work yet.
Man on Man excel at delivering pop hooks in various ways across rock genres, and with ten tracks at 42 minutes, there’s plenty of playful joy on Provincetown.
Ramones’ Ramones uses reduction as a means to end, to bring rock back to its roots, whereas Devo’s Q: Are We Not Men? uses reduction as the end itself to mirror society’s decline.
On Everything Harmony the Lemon Twigs echo and even improve on their 1970s influences with such skill and spirit that they demand we take them seriously.
Continue As a Guest is a more delicate and less hooky version of the New Pornographers, the most reflective they’ve been since 2007’s underrated Challengers.
Spilt Milk is one of the great accomplishments of pop history: a colossus that bestrides pop music and crushed Jellyfish, the band that made it.
We Are Scientists’ Lobes is notable for building its songs specifically around keyboard lines and exploration of 1980s-style synth tones.
The aesthetic sensibility of Bird Street’s Lagoon is the urbane, soundtrack-ready, slightly melancholic popcraft ushered into the world by Club Largo.
It’s difficult to describe the adrenal-gland rush Ned’s Atomic Dustbin’s Are You Normal? still provides 30 years later – like a WWII fighter strafing helpless civilians below.