The power-pop anthems every anthology misses.
A field guide to sweat-and-sugar hooks.
There’s something I’ve always loved about music: the way it can throw you into an emotional spiral even when you were nowhere near it a minute before.
Picture a late winter afternoon. You’re tired. Dull light outside. You press play.
A sudden rush hits, sharp guitars, urgent drums, a voice that sounds like it’s about to burst.
It cuts through you.
Your pulse shifts.
Your shoulders tense.
Your head starts buzzing.
You want to rip your shirt open and shout, “I’M ALIVE. LIFE IS WONDERFUL.”
Or at least go back to when you were fifteen, when everything felt louder, faster, more dramatic, remember the first commotions ?
There’s only one kind of music that does this to me.
Power pop.
There’s something sweating in it. Something that strains at the edges. It sits right between rock’s hedonism and punk’s urgency : melodic, desperate, triumphant all at once.
For me, power pop is, and will always be : loud and plain drums, juvenile voices.
Tune me on something, if it contains both of these things, I’ll label it as power pop.
I will like it twice as much if the lyrics are walking on the edge of embarassment.
In this list, I’ll try to give an overview of what I think is power-pop with a few titles.
If you feel like absolutely BLASTING, something this week, make your ears bleed with these silent hits.
The doll’s playing guitar.
Sylvain Sylvain was one of the two guitarists in the New York Dolls, and after pioneering both glam and punk (!), he exchanged high-heel boots and make-up for leather boots and one of those mod-revival haircuts to produce an album full of power-pop tracks. “Every Boy and Every Girl” is one of the true anthems on the album.
The beat every feet should be tapping.
This band, founded by the great Paul Collins (from The Nerves, the band that first wrote “Hanging on the Telephone,” later a big success for Blondie), went without any commercial success despite a major label, tons of touring, funding, etc. It’s really hard for me to understand, because this is about as radio-friendly as it gets.
Good enough: they leave behind the “very intelligent” and edgy stuff power-pop bands tended to go for at the beginning of new wave.
The big star’s little brother.
It’s a true tragedy that Ardent had distribution issues that prevented their bands from developing. Shadowed by the late shine of Big Star (kind of paradoxical), Cargoe could have been one of the leading power-pop bands. They remind me of a baby The Raspberries and Cheap Trick could have had. Not quite good as their fellow Ardent Records mates, but sure worth a spin.
The teeth brush anthem.
This one carries great memories. I can picture myself in the bathroom, brushing my teeth before high school, listening to this exact song. It felt so fiery, so brave, something in it gave me so much energy in the morning.
7AM, walking to school, I was already bursting with energy. Still, I played “Off Broadway” one more time.
The one that tried to go solo.
Phil Seymour, drummer of the Dwight Twilley Band, stood the test of time as one of the unsung heroes and pioneers of power pop — mainly for a reason that’s quite personal. I feel like he mastered the symbiosis between power and pop, and that album captures this achievement perfectly. Poppy hooks, killer melodies, but with ragged rock and roll edges. This song has such a killer guitar riff, it used to get stuck in my head all day after I heard it for the first time.
The controversial one.
Considered one of the first power-pop supergroups, founded by Gene Cornish and Dino Danelli from the Rascals and Wally Bryson of the Raspberries, Fotomaker was “born to be” a power-pop group — and they never failed to be one. The band rides a fine line between power pop and syrup, but doesn’t forget to deliver some smokin’ hot power pop. “Plaything” is, for me, the most energy-filled track of the album.
Made to blast on your speakers. Hide the cover though.
The absolute left-behind.
Three words: passionate, sensitive, really melodic. It feels like a Wings lost album, a bit rougher on the edges. Zuider Zee is an American band that truly mastered the transition between Beatle-ish melodies and tougher arrangements, leading to a perfect UK-flavored power-pop. Struggling to find a label that matched their vision of “pop perfection” (a more mainstream name could have helped) and a fan base, they quickly called it quits. What’s left is this perfect power pop gem — just listen to it, and to the words.
The eclectic one.
The Beckies are, for me, one of the most versatile power-pop bands. Their first and only album features influences from a lot of different places, but “Right by My Side” is a really crisp power-pop nugget. Unfortunately, the rest sometimes leans away from straightforward power pop, but the overall result is a great testimony of its era. Bonus: the cover really epitomizes something ineffable about teenage madness.
The punks that tried glam.
Reddy Teddy was a band from the Boston area. After having their first project shelved by Mercury Records, they decided to shift to a local record company and muscle their sound. They melt punk, rock, glam, and pop in their pot, and the finished product is some kind of high-power pop. Apparently a closer approximation to their live shows, Shark in the Dark upped the rock quotient, adding a dark, snotty edge to the sound. Melodic and commercial, yet edgy enough to be more than pop. Bonus: they mention The Beatles in the lyrics.
The poppy veterans.
Written by John Wicks and Will Birch of the group The Records (who would hit the charts in 1979), “Hearts in Her Eyes” is a fine gem from a period when The Searchers were… searching. Their 1979 album was an amazing resurrection for a group closely associated with the 1960s, and it was also a major source of inspiration for quite a few late-1970s power pop bands. Interestingly enough, The Searchers released two supremely catchy power-pop albums at the same time as a “new wave” of young power-pop bands were sprouting up everywhere around them.
Heavenly pop melodies from start to finish.
The Buddy Miles related.
There are two things I’m really fond of: connections between bands, and funk-rock. When there’s a connection between a band and an artist, especially when that artist is Buddy Miles, who I consider the master of the funk-rock blend, I grab the record off the shelf. Dirty Angels were founded by Charlie Karp, guitarist of the Buddy Miles Band. Their first album is filthy power pop with harder hints from time to time, and the track I’m offering is so good they decided to re-record it for the second album (?).
The KISS-related.
This one has a different kind of connection. The picture on the cover was supposed to be the cover of the first pre-KISS band, Wicked Lester. When the album was shelved, the picture intended for the cover was shelved too at CBS, and seven years later, Laughing Dogs dug through the archives to find a cover for their first album.
The album sometimes leans into the edgy stuff, but the song here is a pure shot of power-pop energy. There were a lot of bands playing this kind of music at the time, but Laughing Dogs were among the best.
The greatest collaboration.
This is an odd one. Matthew King Kaufman, founder of Beserkley Records, threw a bit of the Beserkley roster into a studio, and they came out with this record. They then selected a couple of ’50s and ’60s songs that were near and dear to their hearts and recorded them. Them’s “I Can Only Give You Everything” crawled its way through this record, and this is an absolute gem. Cranked guitars, loud drums, the whole recipe.
Over the years, I’ve gathered a lot of power-pop numbers, but I’m always on the hunt, let me know what your personal power-pop anthem is.
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