Ah, the euphonic sounds of unabashed pop music. It often gets a bad name from certain quarters, those that equate pop with mass-market corpo-trash not worth the silicone it and its singers are created from. To these people I say “phshaw.” Just as I believe there should be heavy doses of grinding, aggravating noise available for consumer purchase, I think the balance should be maintained through the sugar-sweet melodies of cheery pop. That said, there should be standards.
And the latest release from Pinback, “Summer in Abaddon,” meets those standards by crafting cool, moody, intelligent pop songs through intricate vocals and instrumental arrangements. Everything about this release is a testament to the power of good arrangements and production values in creating great songs. Everything here is intricately arranged and has been formed into compositions bordering on small-band architecture.
The album is not without its faults. The band seems to have found a specific sound they like and they stick to it throughout the entire album. Hardly anything rises above mid-tempo and many of the songs fail to distinguish themselves in any relevant way. A little more eclecticism would have lead to an overall better effort, but why look a gived horse in the mouth? Overall, this is another excellent release from Touch and Go Records.
The latest from Keven Brennan, “God is a Mighty Gourd,” comes to pop music from a different angle — that of a deconstructionist. (I’m thinking of going for the academic triple crown and mentioning post-modernism and Foucault before this article is over.) In an attempt to meld jazz, funk, R&B and hip-hop with an avant-garde compositional structures and surrealist lyrics, Brennan has created a unique musical vision. Of course this doesn’t translate into an interesting album.
Brennan suffers from a simple lack of creativity. He obviously knows what he wants to do, it’s just that what he wants to do is boring and trite. His lyrics flip between self-conscious surrealism and rote love lyrics, his vocals sound like Leonard Cohan without the poetry and his arrangements often stretch a minute or two longer than anyone else would consider necessary.
Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart stand out as influences, but Brennan lacks Zappa’s humor, Beefheart’s drive and either one’s musical ability. He works with a couple of good backing bands and occasionally their talent makes up for what he lacks. But whenever Brennan’s unexpressive vocals kick in, it all falls apart.
On their self-titled debut, the Ditty Bops manage to create a cohesive, intelligent musical vision out of such varied parts as blues, ragtime, folk and old-time string bands. The music is catchy, invigorating and any number of other positive adjectives. The songwriting duo of Abby DeWald and Amanda Barrett crafts great pop songs that evoke the early work of the Violent Femmes without actually sounding anything like them.
Unlike most old-time style string bands, the Ditty Bops aren’t
constricted by such pithy matters as tradition. Drums drive the beat, the melodies borrow as much from modern pop rock as blues and ragtime, electric instruments make a few appearances and the lyrics deal with universal concerns in a thoroughly modern context. The band seems to do whatever necessary to make the music sound as good as possible, which is very good.
Another songwriting duo has also released a good pop album. Tegan and Sara’s latest, “So Jealous,” is a solid collection of pop that draws heavily from a long tradition of folk rock. The songs follow the theme of relationships in decline (yeah, don’t hear a lot about that, eh?). The group sticks to the concept with the stubborn tenacity of a progressive rock band, following it through all of its permutations.
More often than not, the album works as intelligent music that deals with relationships in mature, adult terms. When it works, the songs are catchy pieces of pop rock as good as anything out there. The problem is that when it doesn’t work, the songs hardly rise above filler. In this case, the good outnumbers the filler by a lean margin, and overall the album is worthwhile.

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