Power-pop has a habit of attracting plenty of musicians but few listeners. That may be because pop structure is the ultimate crutch for many a second rate musician. Stick to the script, push all the right buttons and even the Vivian Girls can get mistaken for an actual band. Fortunately there's more to pop craftsmanship than verse chorus verse, and in the right hands you can jettison all that entirely and still leave your audience with candy coated goodness. Take this track by Joel Plaskett, He manages one verse then gets all of five words into the second before deciding that one was enough, mutters "check me out" and solos for the rest of the song. Not exactly a page from the power-pop playbook. And that's only the hardest left turn in a song that built entirely from left turns. Does that make this one of those songs where the artist just strung together all the half-digested ideas that didn't fit into other songs? Maybe, but on this Frankenstein monster the pieces all fit and the seams don't show, and it's that kind of sheer craftsmanship, not a fawning adherence to a time-worm bag of pop tropes that is the REAL essence of pop.Friday, September 18, 2009
999,998: Joel Plaskett Emergency — Written All Over Me
Power-pop has a habit of attracting plenty of musicians but few listeners. That may be because pop structure is the ultimate crutch for many a second rate musician. Stick to the script, push all the right buttons and even the Vivian Girls can get mistaken for an actual band. Fortunately there's more to pop craftsmanship than verse chorus verse, and in the right hands you can jettison all that entirely and still leave your audience with candy coated goodness. Take this track by Joel Plaskett, He manages one verse then gets all of five words into the second before deciding that one was enough, mutters "check me out" and solos for the rest of the song. Not exactly a page from the power-pop playbook. And that's only the hardest left turn in a song that built entirely from left turns. Does that make this one of those songs where the artist just strung together all the half-digested ideas that didn't fit into other songs? Maybe, but on this Frankenstein monster the pieces all fit and the seams don't show, and it's that kind of sheer craftsmanship, not a fawning adherence to a time-worm bag of pop tropes that is the REAL essence of pop.
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How can one review this track without taking note of the woo-hoos? I appreciate their clear love of mid-period Steve Miller. It's kinda got that 70s proggy, blooze chugga-chugga that I don't like, too, but I'm a sucker for guitar solos, so we're cool.
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