The AV Club tries to put out the definitive word on power pop (one of my favorite musical genres), but fails to mention The Plimsouls, Redd Kross, Matthew Sweet, and many others:
Next steps: For modern bands who’ve followed in the Shoes’ shoes, you’d do well to pick up nearly any album by Canadian retro-power-pop act Sloan—in particular, 1996’s One Chord To Another, where the band began to push its sound into fuzzier, hookier territory. (Also, as with Shoes, every member of Sloan contributes songs and vocals to each album.) The ’90s indie-rock favorite Guided By Voices also has a Black Vinyl Shoes-like crackle to its sound, even on the relatively polished Under The Bushes Under The Stars, its most overtly power-pop album. If three of the members of The Exploding Hearts hadn’t died in a car crash in 2003, that band might well have done for 21st-century power-pop what The White Stripes did for garage-rock; nevertheless, The Exploding Hearts’ debut album Gutter Romantic is a classic. Tragedy also tabled the promising career of Material Issue, whose frontman Jim Ellison killed himself after the release of the band’s 1994 masterpiece Freak City Soundtrack, which is arguably the second-best power-pop record of the ’90s. The best? Matthew Sweet’s 1991 opus Girlfriend, which helped introduce the grunge generation to sparkle and coo. Also in the running for the 1990s’ top power-pop LPs: Fountains Of Wayne’s Utopia Parkway, which married pointed social observation to some of the sharpest hooks the genre has ever produced.
Reaching back a bit further, Marshall Crenshaw’s self-titled 1982 debut album is maybe too genteel and twangy to count as traditional power-pop, but it’s hard to think of an album from its era that’s as infectiously catchy, and in that way, it’s at least a fellow-traveler to the genre. And while the Shoes’ contemporaries in Big Star went in some odd directions before breaking up, the band’s debut album, #1 Record, practically provides the template for power-pop with songs like “When My Baby’s Beside Me” and “The Ballad Of El Goodo.” The model was cobbled together from pieces of late-’60s/early-’70s bands like The Who, The Move, The Raspberries, Badfinger, and The Nazz. The frontman for The Nazz, Todd Rundgren, has gone on to explore power-pop off and on throughout his solo career and as a member of Utopia, and the latter’s self-titled 1982 album is perhaps Rundgren’s purest shot at the genre. Lastly, there are several indispensable compilations of power-pop around, including Rhino’s Poptopia and two from Numero Group: Yellow Pills and Titan: It’s All Pop!
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