Dating back to 1994’s Live…My Truck Is My Home and The 9 Volt Years: Battery Powered Home Demos from four years later, Marshall Crenshaw has created an alternate universe for himself with a discerning series of recordings from his personal archives (not to mention expanded editions of previously released studio efforts).
Like last year’s From the Hellhole, The Bootleg Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw 1984-1987, this is an amalgam of original songs and covers, interwoven with snippets of novelties. The overall effect of the often-informal fifteen-track sequence is much like that of the Beatles’ Get Back in its early stages, an array of content that illuminates not only the fundamental skills of all the contributors, but also the principal’s attributes as a songwriter…
Category: power-pop
The Nerves were an American power pop trio, formed in San Francisco in 1974 and later based in Los Angeles, featuring guitarist Jack Lee, bassist Peter Case, and drummer Paul Collins. All three members composed songs and sang.
Although The Nerves only lasted a short time they managed to self release one legendary 4 song EP in 1976 distributed by Bomp! Records that included 2 Jack Lee songs: “Hanging On The Telephone” and “Give Me Some Time,” 1 Peter Case song: “When You Find Out,” and 1 Paul Collins song: “Working Too Hard,” and play many shows up and down the west coast and to tour the US and Canada including some support slots with the Ramones.
The Nerves went on to become one of the most influential of the new wave…
It has now become a sort of tradition for artists from Sweden to come up with some high-quality to excellent power pop and pop rock.
Is it something in the water, or something else, makes no difference. We are regularly treated with the pop-oriented sounds that are oh so easy on the ear.
Count in former frontman of power poppers The Merrymakers David Myhr in, who has just come up with his third solo album, Everything Is All About You. Now, The Merrymakers were able to make quite a name all around with their take on power pop, but here, Myhr takes a bit of a different approach.
That difference is that Myhr leaves a lot of that power element in the shadows and…
…Originally self-released in 2023 as an ultra-limited cassette run of about 50 copies, the album received a wider official reissue on vinyl, CD, and digital formats on September 4, 2026 via Perennial and K Records.
Sharp Pins‘ Mod Mayday 23 is a cute concept; the band’s Kai Slater picks his favorite tracks from the Mods Mayday ’79 collection, which was recorded in at a live 1979 concert featuring the cream of the U.K mod revival crop. Bands like Squire, Secret Affair, the Merton Parkas, and Small Hours were all formed in the wake of the Jam’s ascendance and followed a similar path of pairing the hopped-up R&B sounds of the original mod scene with the feisty aggression of punk. Slater captures the intensity and hookiness of…
How to persuade men to open up about their feelings has long been an issue that has perplexed mental health professionals, an intractable problem leading to a range of outside-the-box solutions: men’s sheds, cycling groups, even, you suspect, the repeated commissioning of Mortimer and Whitehouse’s Gone Fishing. After hearing Do Not Dare To Dream, however, any future campaigns should think about signing up Teenage Fanclub as musical figureheads. Their thirteenth album might have been recorded in an isolated environment – the current quintet of Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley, Euros Childs, Francis Macdonald and David McGowan gathering on the Scottish island of Great Bernera – but it’s far from remote, its songs of sadness, alienation and creeping…
…features 104 tracks, demos, outtakes, live performances, interviews, and other rare recordings half of which are previously unreleased.
Year Zero, 1976. While his punk contemporaries were at least pretending to hate old music, D.P. Costello had fewer qualms about negotiating with the past. He unpicked the mysteries of Mississippi John Hurt; channelled Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison; was “completely unnerved” rather than contemptuous when he spotted Bert Jansch in the audience at one of his early gigs. Taking The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo as a gateway drug, he studied the heartbreak and nuance of country and dreamed of becoming a Nashville songwriter. He even tried his hand at Vaudeville whimsy. A fleet-footed 1976 demo called…
Music fans worldwide know Roger Joseph Manning Jr. as co-founder or member of the bands Jellyfish, Imperial Drag, The Moog Cookbook, TV Eyes, Beatnik Beatch, and The Lickerish Quartet, in addition to being a member of Beck’s band and an in-demand session player. Over the years, he’s contributed to albums by Beck, Morrissey, Lana Del Rey, Blink 182, Johnny Cash, and Adele, among many others.
Omnivore Recordings is thrilled to continue their long association with Manning in releasing his new split EP/live EP which together form the album Hopium. Side one features five new songs, some of which have been in the works for over 15 years. Across the ensuing years, Manning worked with musician friends…
These days, Alfie Agnew is a Maths professor at California State University Fullerton. Back in the 1980s, however, he was singer and guitarist with US punks the Adolescents, as well as DI along with Sean Elliot. However, while academia might provide a more regular income than playing music, it clearly isn’t anything like as much fun. So, for the last decade, the pair of them have been scratching that itch in their side hustle, Professor and the Madman, along with Rat Scabies and Paul Gray of the Damned.
Dreamworld is far from a group of punk veterans revisiting old glories though. In fact, its inspirations reach far further back than that. Indeed, its cover art, which takes a significant cue from the Beatles’ Revolver gives more than…
In the 1970s, The Hollywood Stars were a band that was supposed to hit it big but didn’t quite connect with the masses, thanks to a variety of record company foul-ups and the wrong-headed production of their self-titled 1977 debut album. The band was lucky enough to have a small but committed cult following who kept the tales of their powerful live shows alive, and a pair of archival releases — 2013’s Shine Like a Radio: The Great Lost 1974 Album and 2019’s Sound City — allowed fans of ’70s glam and power pop to at long last hear how they were meant to sound. The albums generated enough buzz that the group reunited, and 2026’s Hey! L.A.! is their second studio LP since returning to duty. As the title suggests, Hey! L.A.! is a loose concept album,…
…new 50th anniversary 2CD expansion of The Flamin’ Groovies’ 1976 Sire debut is built around a new remaster of the original album from the analog tapes. The bonus disc adds previously unreleased outtakes and alternates as well as the existing audio from a Roxy show in ’76.
A lot had happened with the Flamin’ Groovies in the nearly five years that separated the epochal Teenage Head album and their return to American record racks with Shake Some Action. The Groovies lost their record deal with Buddah; lead singer Roy Loney had quit the band, leaving Cyril Jordan as the uncontested leader; and they had spent a lot of time in Europe, building a significant following in the United Kingdom. As a result, the Flamin’ Groovies on Shake Some Action…
Abnormal Conditions’ is the fifth album by upstate New York roots rockers Frank Migliorelli and the Dirt Nappers, and it is an absolute corker.
It blends rock, soul, folk and even sixties pop in a wonderfully ‘live’ feeling record. With two members of Springsteen’s backing band in Soozie Tyrell and Lisa Lowell helping out, the pedigree of the band is unquestionable.
In his mid-sixties, Migliorelli has had a long and varied artistic career. He has been a computer and video game developer, written children’s music and worked in educational media and been a creative director at a design firm. He has also found time to produce blues and soul music before returning to writing and performing, which he has been doing for the past ten years.
The Brazilian brothers Khouri, vocalist and lead guitarist Matheus and bassist/vocalist Thiago Khouri, have obviously listened to every record cut in Liverpool in the early ’60s and absorbed some important lessons regarding brevity, harmony, the proper amount of jangle, and whacking the listener across the chops with a big fat hook. They’ve put those studies to good use in their group Banda AL9, releasing two excellent albums both in Portuguese and English before 2026’s English-only Hey! Hey! We’re Banda AL9. It wouldn’t matter if the record were sung in Martian, anyone with a love for bright and sunny guitar rock that sounds a bunch like, well, almost exactly like, the Beatles when Paul took over and scrubbed any irony or darkness from the final product,…
If you make an album that sounds different to what you’ve done in the past, listeners will complain that it doesn’t sound like your previous work. If you make an album that doesn’t stray from the path, however, listeners will then criticize you for not having any new ideas. It’s getting harder and harder to please anyone any of the time, let alone some people some of the time, so what exactly is the solution? On their third studio album, Vancouver-via-Vernon’s Mock Media might have perfected their masterplan: sound like everybody and nobody else simultaneously.
While plenty of bands will be afraid to leave their comfort zone out of fear that they’ll create something misaligned with their established sound, this is a band that already existed…
Whenever some music that has not been in the immediate focus of critics and audiences, pops up, they tend to call it ‘resurrected.’ Power pop is one of those, but it is just another genre that has been around since the 60s that has never gone away, it just isn’t given the attention and credit it deserved all along.
It seems that Little Steven Van Zandt never lost it out of his focus, as his Wicked Cool Records keep coming up with some serious power pop (extended) gems more often than not.
Count among those Haunted By American Dreams by Ryan Hamilton. It is the kind of power pop where that extended addition to the term comes in – Hamilton adds bits and pieces of the so-called heartland rock to the usual mix of…
Modernism functions as both a companion piece to Chris Stamey’s 2025 LP Anything Is Possible and a love letter to the wide spectrum of crafted pop hooks and freeform rock that saturated AM/FM radio frequencies in the ’60s and early ’70s. Working out of his Modern Recording studio in Chapel Hill, N.C., the dB’s cofounder and onetime Alex Chilton collaborator revisits classics by the Beatles, the Kinks, Sly and The Family Stone, the Left Banke and others, also throwing in a few of his own songs.
Modernism’s formidable guest list includes Big Star’s Jody Stephens, Wilco’s Pat Sansone, members of the dB’s, Brian Wilson alumni Probyn Gregory and Nelson Bragg, the Uptown Horns, drummer Jon Wurster (Mountain Goats,…
If every picture tells a story, then perhaps the album cover for The Hanging Stars‘ latest release, Just a Day, is perhaps something of a statement of intent because it features a simple photo of the four current band members standing against a dusty cornflower blue backdrop.
A line-up change at the end of 2024 resulted in a more stripped down version of the band with a quartet of Richard Olson (vocals and guitar), Patrick Ralla (guitar), Paul Milne (bass) and Paulie Cobra (drums) – this being his last recording before a prolonged sabbatical, his live replacement for live tours being Charlie Salvidge who has played previously with the bands TOY, Proper Ornaments, and Great Silkie.
Their sixth proper release in ten years – their…
Slippers‘ cozy brand of indie pop is baked to perfection on their second album Slippers 08. Madeline BB is the writer and singer, and drummer too, and she’s got the whole thing figured out. It’s never a bad idea to mix together intimate C-86 noise pop, woolly Elephant 6-sounding indie, and hooky, pocket-sized power pop, especially when the songs are short and focused, the guitars are crisp and jangly, the rhythm section plays with economical punch, and the vocals have best friend warmth. BB’s lyrics feel like that same friend telling you about her hopes, dreams, problems, and feelings; it’s so small scale and intimate that it’s impossible not to be drawn in right away. She never overstays her welcome musically, keeping the songs very short and never…
If you were going to go looking for rough but melodic bands, you might very well start in Ohio. That’s where the granddaddy of them all — Guided by Voices — got its start, not to mention the Greenhornes, New Bomb Turks, Times New Viking, Cloud Nothings and many, many others. There’s something about flat, fertile, churchy Ohio that encourages rebellion, even oddity — remember Pere Ubu and Devo came from here. But there’s also a midwestern full-hearted-ness in even the most confrontational of bands. There’s ragged soul in ragged riffs here, and if you want evidence, look no further than Smug Brothers.
Smug Brothers, out of Dayton, have been at it for two decades, garnering modest success but an engaging catalogue. The band formed…