The Best 50 Powerpop Albums according to RYM

don't know any of them, i remember sam philips but never heard her

i might go see Paul Collins Beat they are coming to mpls!

btw hi pappa good to see you round :)

Also, from the same friend:

The Grip Weeds - House of Vibes
The Hummingbirds - Lovebuz
Cheap Star - Speaking Like An Elephant
Mark & The Spies - Give Me a Look (like a new, foreign Spongetones)
The Orgone Box (which led me to Orange's "Judy Over The Rainbow")

x-post, and HI!

...and The Wind's "Guest of the Staphs" ep.

I'd be curious to see how Paul Collins' Beat pull it off these days!

Myrakle Blah a classic powerpop band, in that they're great fun for the first song - is it Super Tuesday? - and duller and duller thereafter. The Hummingbirds' album is pretty solid, though.

xpost: friends of mine went to the beat in chicago last year and said great things

A lot of that stuff is second-rate at best but it's worth searching out for occasional solid tracks. I'll second the Hummingbirds recommendation.

THe Windbreakers, definitely. I had forgotten about them, which is really sad. Terminal was my favorite record by them, but the were all worth a listen at least.

If The Wind is the band I'm thinking of, they put out some excellent breezy powerpop things. It seems like they had a record or two on Bomp, Voxx or Midnight. One of those '80s labels...

Lordy me, I just don't understand. .38 Special isn't power pop, and the Knack sucked, but at least the Knack sang about the things that power pop is all about. Not too well, but they at least tried. In the New York Times they have this slide show of significant deaths of 2010 and they put Doug Feiger, that idiot from the Knack, in the slide show but left out Alex Chilton! Re the first comment--how is "Radio City" not power pop? Bryan Adams? Rick Springfield? There's also the looming question of, like, quality here...Jeezus.

And speaking of things, there was a great band called The Things that might fit in here.

why was doug fieger an idiot? i think the knack did what they did really well.

Yeah, I'll take Get The Knack over any Big Star album -- it's not even close. And he wasn't an idiot; he wrote (and sang) some great songs. (As did Adams, Springfield, and 38 Special, whether they were powerpop or not. And a lot of times, they were.)

I'll take Get The Knack over any Big Star album

I don't hate the Knack or anything but this is crazy talk

No it's not.

Also not remotely clear to me how say "So Caught Up In You" or "Hold On Loosely" or "If I'd Been The One" (or "Jessie's Girl" or "Cuts Like A Knife") are not "about the things that powerop is all about" -- like, mainly, boy-and-girl problems and stuff, right? -- but what do I know?

'Hold on Loosely' is as powerpop as anything has ever been.
And I'll throw BoC's "Burnin' for You" back into the mix, at this point...

^^^^^The Windbreakers' Disciples of Agriculture: "I'll Be There" isn't the greatest song ever with that title, but it's not all that far behind. I also saved "You Gotta Go Away" and "Lonely Beach" in the permanent library.

I now have an inkling of understanding as to why power pop fans are so annoyingly self-righteous - it's because of Totally Missing The Point lists like this.

Would have voted for Nerves 7" single over all of this

Rubber City Rebels

bump this... I have been in obsessive mixtape mode recently and discovered a bunch of good (new to me) stuff thanks to Emmett McAuliffe's book "Pop Power" and a few hours sifting through accumulated and unlistened compilations. ones that I remember off the top of my head that are on youtube:

The Keys - I Don't Wanna Cry
Sorrows - Teenage Heartbreak

The Treble Boys' Julie Anne was stuck in my head for a couple days straight.

also recently saw Brendan Benson live with the Posies and they ended their set with a killer version of September Gurls. He puts on a solid show, great voice that's right on pitch and everything was paced well.

Does anyone have recommendations for late 80s, early 90s shoegazey power pop? E.g. the Candyskins' Never Will Forget You, the Hummingbirds' Everything You Said (produced by Mitch Easter).

Didn't go thru all the responses but no Redd Kross? jeeesh!
j

Redd Kross aside, where are The feckin' Raspberries?!?! Copper Blue beating Marshall Crenshaw's s/t 18-1 is totes ridiculous, too.

An album that never gets mentioned by powerpop fans (or Fleetwood Mac fans) is Walter Egan's debut Fundamental Roll, which I think any Crenshaw fan would love. Produced by Lindsey Buckingham, full of Buddy Holly-influenced songs about girls and cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjkdFJTqcFk

The problem with RYM is that once an act is deemed partly powerpop, they are automatically competing on equal level with powerpop absolutist acts. Thus, Weezer and Sugar do better than Raspberries and Rubinoos, because indie is more popular on RYM than powerpop.

Does anyone have recommendations for late 80s, early 90s shoegazey power pop?

I don't know a whole lot about shoegaze, but my sense is that the James Dean Driving Experience might fit. There's a site called Obscurely Fragile Productions that posted their stuff last year. "Oh, Grateful" is a favourite.

i'll check that out, thanks clemenza.

Hold fire...Just so's you don't think I'm crazy, the James Dean Experience aren't shoegaze at all. I think I made the connection because that Obscurely Fragile site posts other stuff that is shoegaze. JDE are power-pop, but not shoegaze. They're far away from Chuck Eddy's crunchy power-pop, too--they're about as twee as you can get and still be power-pop (not an oxymoron for me, but for a lot of people, yes). Anyway, they're great; I've been listening to them in the car for a couple of days, and "Oh, Grateful," which I've had for a couple of years, is only one of many excellent songs they left behind on a handful of EPs.

JDDE were lumped in with the shambling scene at the time. I saw them several times on C86ish bills - never thought of them as powerpop.

Most people wouldn't. I've got a really wide net on that that takes in stuff from JDDE to certain Riot Girl songs.

This thread is all over the place. People who like power pop usually only like one variety of it. Some YouTube's might help!

Here's an ever-so-slightly inferior EP version (as opposed to the flexi-disc) of the James Dean Driving Experience's "Oh, Grateful." You can decide for yourself whether it has anything at all to do with power-pop. If, for you, the term covers territory from 20/20 to Matthew Sweet, it won't; if you're like me, and it means something closer to jangly guitars, it does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CiqzZZFBlU

Hmmm. I like that well enough, and I see the argument for counting it within the genre - it comes from many of the same sources as trad powerpop - but count that as powerpop and a ton of Brit indie from 85/86/87 suddenly becomes powerpop rather than indiepop ... I like both, because they hit a lot of the same pleasure centres, for the same reasons, but I can't help feeling they're just different beasts. But given I was arguing Hollywood Records is powerpop upthread, I'm not in a strong position to make the "but it's just not!" assertion.

I gave a power-pop mix-CD to a friend last year, and I detected a definite "You call this power-pop?" disbelief when I asked him what he thought of it. I know he came around to like the songs eventually, but my guess is that he never accepted it as power-pop.

JDDE sounds more powerpop to me than Weezer or Sugar do. The powerpop scene has more or less adopted that late 80s jangly guitar thing with the likes of The Smithereens and Hoodoo Gurus, and this sounds rather similar to them indeed.

anyone heard the new dwight twilley? i was browsing stereophile in the library & they said it sounded just like those first two; same guitarist, same rockabilly echo & sharp tunes. could be a case of "best since exile" syndrome though.

I had no idea there was a new Twilley album. he's not the only one to make a comeback - Richard X. Heyman, Mitch Easter, and Marshall Crenshaw have all come out with solid new albums recently.

I have a feeling that 2011 is going to be a big year for Power Pop. The Shoes into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Endorsement deals for the Pop Flies. A reality show for Peter Holsapple. I can't put my finger on why I feel this, it's just a hunch.

Geir, JDDE sound nothing like Smithereens or Hoodoo Gurus. The latter two are rock bands with not a hint of twee. JDDE are a jangly band with a whole barrelload of twee.

clemenza for president!

the indie pop/twee vs. power pop distinction is one of the tougher ones to delineate precisely, along with pub rock and possibly power pop tinged 2000s emo. there are a bunch of poppy twee bands but most are a degree or two of separation too far away from the raspberries/beatles/big star model to really count. typically the problem is in the vocals, which are either not melodic enough or too kiddie. IMO.

i second that emotion, obv.

just listening to Oh Grateful - reminds me of the Field Mice's "Coach Station Reunion" which was in the running for a recent mixtape before coming to the conclusion that it's not power pop. solid track either way.

Geir, JDDE sound nothing like Smithereens or Hoodoo Gurus. The latter two are rock bands with not a hint of twee. JDDE are a jangly band with a whole barrelload of twee.

I would say this song, its chorus in particular, contains just those twee elements that make it fit into the powerpop style.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkYmSYtGzmI

Twee, Geir? Listen to the words. I Want You Back's chorus is a revenge fantasy. Musically, too, it's far too robust. Soaring 60s styled choruses do not on their own make something twee.

anyone heard the new dwight twilley?

Yeah, I reviewed it for Rhapsody. Sounded pretty wimpy to me. It's got a couple tracks I wouldn't mind hearing again, but nothing near the level of "I'm On Fire" (I otherwise don't know his early LPs very well.) And that's it, as far as I could tell. My review:

http://www.rhapsody.com/dwight-twilley/green-blimp#albumreview

My three favorite things to argue about:

1) baseball hall of fame resumes
2) is it power pop or not?
3) will she or won't she run in 2012?

Power pop arguments are the friendliest. We make our case, we move on. 2012 arguments are tricky, because you're trying to get inside the mind of a wingnut--the terrain in there is rough and unfamilar. HOF arguments are bloodsport. Words like "Dawson," "Rice," and (especially) "Blyleven" are weapons of mass destruction.

yeah, there is basically nothing twee about that Hoodoo Gurus track. and yes, she will, or at least I hope so!

I was in Queen Video this afternoon, a Toronto store that specializes in cult and foreign stuff, and all of a sudden the Shoes' "Do You Wanna Get Lucky?" came over the speaker. I had only dropped in for two minutes to pick up something specific, so the odds of a) them playing the Shoes x b) me being there to hear this = astronomical. I asked the punk girl at the counter if it was the radio; no, it was a mix-CD from a friend. (She handed me the case, and I took a quick look--saw Guided by Voices and the Suicide Commandos.)

Hearing the Shoes in a public space: it's never to me happened before, and will never happen again. I had to commemorate the occasion.

WXRT in Chicago occasionally plays a Shoes song or two; if you ever find yourself in a public space in Chicagoland that's playing XRT over the PA, it may well happen again.

I'm on my way. (I visited a friend in Rockford once--I know they're famous within a 17 mile radius.)

New discovery: the Lovelies' "Troublehead."

http://grooveshark.com/#/album/The+Tuff+Of+The+Tracks/5885736

I almost wonder if the Los Campesinos people didn't have it somewhere in the back of their mind when they wrote "You! Me! Dancing!" I just wish it were longer.

Yeah, I had a bunch of Lovelies singles and that album back in the day. Pleasant but just didn't make a lasting impression.