Brian Wilson - Imagination 1998

 Brian Wilson - Imagination
This is the second official solo album by Brian Wilson, pop genius of the Beach Boys. It was released 1998, 10 years after his first solo album 'Brian Wilson'. I will post it later, too.
 Enjoy
         Frank   Flac

Comeback for the Pretties! The Pretty Things - Cross Talk (1980) Flac

Who would have thought it? Reunited after splitting in the mid-'70s, the Pretty Things return with a new wave album. It's not what anyone might have expected, but it's very far from a disaster. The stop-on-a-dime arrangements and natural power show them to be well-seasoned, and Phil May, with an extremely mannered voice, comes across as a taunting frontman. In fact, you tend to feel that if Thin Lizzy had eased up on the metal, they might have made an album very much like this -- great, catchy songs based in R&B and old rock & roll ("Lost That Girl") -- but with the tongue firmly in cheek (check the Sting imitation on "No Future") while pandering to fashion. But when the results are as good as the jangly "Office Love" or "I'm Calling," you really don't care where the tongue's residing. There's a sense of history about the '50s drums on "Falling Again" that no young bucks could ever match, nor could they come close to the band's overall professionalism or stinging guitar work of Peter Tolson. Any of these ten tracks would have made a great single and by rights should have returned the band to major-name status.

But justice is thin on the ground in music and instead it became one of the lost Pretties albums -- a shame, since in its own lighter way, it's every bit as good as their classic albums of a decade earlier. Some reunions don't work; this one just roars. (allmusic.com)

It was a very strong album by the band in 1980. Very powerful songs. Recommendable.
Have fun
               Frank
Flac

The Motors - Approved By The Motors Lp 1978 Flac & The Virgin Years (Four albums) mp3

After several years in England's pub rock scene, ex-Duck Deluxe members Nick Garvey and Andy McMaster formed the Motors in 1977 with vocalist Bram Tchaikovsky and drummer Ricky Slaughter. Their first album was a splendid piece of guitar-driven pop/rock highlighted by the single "Dancing the Night Away." Approved By was the album that earned them the U.K. hits "Airport" and "Forget About You"; the record saw the band's songwriting improving with forceful melodies and invigorating performances.

After that record, the Motors split up; Garvey and McMaster used the band's name for the 1980 album Tenement Steps, which didn't equal the spark of their first two records. The Motors' second album shows a marked improvement over their debut, with a stronger melodic base and catchier songs including the British hits "Airport" and "Forget About You." [The 2006 CD version adds three bonus tracks.]

 I thought about which Motors efforts i should post and i will post now the ''Approved...''album in Flac and  '' The Motors - The Virgin Years'' with four albums in mp3. So something for everyone here, flac lovers and mp3 lovers. I think we all can live with that. Hope you like it and if there is interest here in the community i will post the solo albums from guitarist and vocalist Bram Tchaikowsky in the next days. Okay , here we go
Cheers
           Frank 
Approved by the Motors Flac

The Virgin Years mp3@320 

The Small Faces - The Autumn Stone (Lp) (1969) Flac

The Autumn Stone was the only double LP in the history of Immediate Records, and it came out as the company was entering its death throes, a desperate effort to cash in on the library of tapes of the Small Faces. When lead singer Steve Marriott quit in the waning days of 1968, the group had been midway into recording a new album that would have been its third for the label and a follow-up to 1968's popular Ogden's Nut Gone Flake.

Left high and dry by Marriott's departure, and with an uncertain future ahead for the group, the company elected to release the first anthology of the Small Faces' work. The result was The Autumn Stone, a mix of hit singles (going all the way back to their Decca Records years, with "Whatcha Gonna Do About It" and "All or Nothing") and up through their final 45, "The Universal," plus three songs recorded live at Newcastle Town Hall in early 1968, a bunch of album tracks, and some unissued tracks from the tail-end of their history, presumably intended for their third, never-finished Immediate LP. It was the first (and, for over 20 years, the best) overview of the group's work and history, depicting its transition from a white British Invasion-era soul band to a more laid-back and experimental psychedelic outfit.

I know a lot people think different about it, but in my opinion Steve Marriott's creative high time were in the Small Faces. Enjoy

Frank  Flac 

 

The Posies - Frosting On The Beater 1993 Flac

Frosting on the Beater opens with a thick wall of distorted guitars and booming drums kicking up a very melodic fuss behind Ken Stringfellow and Jonathan Auer's creamy-smooth harmonies on the psych-tinged "Dream All Day," and the track's sweet-and-sour blend immediately announces this is going to be a very different affair than the Posies' major label debut, Dear 23. With noisy rock dude Don Fleming in the producer's chair, it came as no great surprise that Frosting on the Beater was a much harder sounding album than the introspective Dear 23, but surprisingly enough, Fleming also knew how to make the most of the band's expert pop songwriting; with the tempos and guitars turned, the tunes gained a needed physical impact that brought the melodies and hooks into the forefront, where they belonged. Just as importantly, the spot-on harmonies that were the highlight of Dear 23 were still very much in evidence, resting atop the piles of fuzzy guitar chords like a dollop of hot fudge poured over a big scoop of ice cream. And prior to this, who knew that Ken Stringfellow and Jonathan Auer could rock out so hard (and so well) on guitars? One could argue that the big guitar attack of Frosting on the Beater was simply the Posies' way of trying to cash in on the grunge sweepstakes that briefly turned their hometown of Seattle into the center of the rock universe. But one listen also reveals that it transformed a smart but overly precious pop outfit into a hard-charging power pop band that gained a wealth of strength without giving up any of their smarts in the process -- not a bad bargain.(allmusic.com)

Power Pop at it's best. An absolute Power Pop classic from the Posies. Nothing more to say about it...or?...no lol. Have fun and
bis bald
            Frank   Flac

Birmingham Sunday - A Message From Birmingham Sunday (1968) 1998 Flac

Birmingham Sunday was a band from Nevada that consisted of Ward Johns, Debbie Parks, John Kvam, Jean Heim, Joe LaChew and Phil Gustafson. Although not much is known about the band and its members, A Message from Birmingham Sunday
was originally released as a test pressing in 1968 on the All American Record label. The band play a variety of styles but the music on this album is mainly a folk based psychedelic pop sound with strong vocal harmonies. The singers alternate between male and female vocal leads with a wall of sound background that contains guitars, wind instruments, swirling organ and synthesizer. The entire album only clocks in at just more than 27 minutes but it is an enjoyable piece of late 60's psychedelia. The CD itself is housed in an impressive digipack but the only drawback on packaging is the lack of detailed liner notes and information on the band. The overall sound quality is good but there seems to be some sound fading on a couple of songs perhaps due to the quality of the master tapes. Despite some minor drawbacks it is nice to see such a rare album finally receiving a legitimate release. (allmusic.com)

I stumbled over Birmingham Sunday at visiting a friend at his home. Since that day i love this album.

If you want to know more about the band search the internet. You can find a lot info about the band. I don't understand why allmusic writes that there is not much known of the band...? Anyway if you like sunshine pop with folk and a little rock influences, grab it.
Cheers
           Frank  Flac

oops...sorry i forgot the link! Hope it works now.

The Spongetones - Always Carry On The Best Of The Spongetones 1980-2005 (2008) mp3@320

It seems in some ways that the Spongetones have always been around, and while they're no Flamin' Groovies on the longevity front, this 26-track anthology covering their first 25 years as a power pop mainstay does make plain their talents. Unfortunately, it also exposes the limitations that have always kept them from attracting more than a small but devoted cult audience of hardcore power pop fetishists. The Spongetones, a quartet from Charlotte, NC who impressively have maintained the same lineup ever since guitarist and primary singer/songwriter Jamie Hoover joined a nascent version of the band in 1978, started out as unapologetic British Invasion fans in the style of the Sire Records-era Flamin' Groovies. The first eight tracks here, from the first two albums Beat Music and Torn Apart (since 1994 yoked together as the CD Beat & Torn), aren't "updated" or "revisionist" British Invasion-style tunes, they're the real thing two decades too late. That purist aesthetic was dropped with 1987's Where-Ever-Land, which introduced synths and all the bad production elements (too much reverb on the drums, that sort of thing) that marred so many albums in the latter half of the '80s, and shifted the Spongetones over into Marshall Crenshaw territory. Musically speaking, that's basically where they've remained ever since, so the last two-thirds of this compilation fall into a bit of a rut in terms of songwriting and performance. (In their favor, however, the production got a lot better after the misguided modernisms of Where-Ever-Land.) Hoover and his bandmates are undeniably talented at what they do, but listening to this lengthy summation of their first quarter century shows how little the band has progressed as songwriters during this period. Not in the sense that bands should necessarily get more complex or move away from the sounds that initially inspired them, mind, but in the sense that the Spongetones have got the power pop sound down cold but have never been first-rank songwriters on the level of, say, Pat DiNizio of the Smithereens or Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple of the dB's, to name two of their contemporaries. There's not a "Shake Some Action," a "Cynical Girl," or a "Places That Are Gone" in these 26 tracks, a crowning, singular achievement amongst all the clever songcraft. Of course, not everyone can be the Beatles, and as Always Carry On: The Best of the Spongetones 1980-2005 proves, there's something to be said for being the Dave Clark 5.(Stewart Mason allmusic.com)

Hello Folks, here come the Spongetones! A fine Power Pop band with a very strong sixties sound. And how Mason describes the first two records, they are no revisionists they are really the original...only (then) twenty years too late. But today it's 2016 and for me it's not interesting if the record is from the sixties or the eighties, i enjoy (or not) their music today in 2017. Mason write a lot of things that's true and i can second them...and i love the Spongetones for her music and that they are a fairly good Power Pop band. If you like Power Pop with 60's roots you're exactly right here.
Three cheers for 60's style Power Pop
                                                            Frank   mp3@320

The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic 2000 Flac

Mass Romantic is a barnstorming debut from the New Pornographers, a collection of Vancouver-based indie rockers. With chief songwriting duties falling into the hands of Destroyer's Dan Bejar and Zumpano's Carl Newman, the album displays a decidedly power pop form of indie rock. Guitars wail and ratchet as keyboards swirl toward every direction of the compass. The vocals, handled by Bejar, Newman, drummer Kurt Dahl, and alt-country star Neko Case, are sung in a style that delivers maximum catchiness. The band displays a keen sense of musical history, as the songs cover influences ranging from the Beatles ("The Mary Martin Show") to David Bowie ("The Slow Descent into Alcoholism") to T. Rex ("Mystery Hours") to Todd Rundgren ("The Fake Headlines"). Mass Romantic is noisy, fuzzy, crunchy, and hook-heavy. It's an album that reveals its charms through repeat listens, and makes a listener wonder how the band can master so many different musical styles via so many vocalists while still maintaining a fiercely cohesive sound.

Case, who has previously proven herself a master of warped country crooning, proves herself equally accomplished in the world of rock swagger with her vocals on "Mass Romantic" and "Letter from an Occupant"; she provides background vocals on a number of other tracks as well. In some better alternate reality, Mass Romantic's bitter yet sugary staccato treats would have burnt up the charts with hit single after hit single.

Great Power Pop from this canadian band. Nearly all albums where Carl Newman is involved are favourites of mine. Have fun!
                                                Frank  Flac

John's Children - A Midsummer Night's Scene (Singles A's & B's) 1988

John's Children - A Midsummer Night's Scene (Bam Caruso 1988)

The A- and B-sides of all of their singles, plus the Andy Ellison solo number "It's Been a Long Time." It's missing some interesting material from Instant Action, but it's generally the best anthology available, as well as the only readily obtainable one.

And this are the best available quotes from allmusic.com about the band. Who don't know who's John's Children: It was the band/project where Marc Bolan of later T.Rex fame made his first footsteps in professional  music business.  To describe the music in a few words: A kind of psychedelic mod pop...maybe lol. Listen yourself.

Cheers
           Frank  Flac - New link

60's Psychedelic Baroque Pop Ice - Ice Man '67 - '68 Complete Recordings (2005)

UK psychedelic pop quintet formed in the mid-60s while John Carter (bass), Glyn James (vocals), Lynton Naiff (organ), Grant Serpell (drums) and Steve Turner (guitar) were attending Sussex University in Brighton, Sussex, England. Their debut single, ‘Anniversary (Of Love)’, was released in 1967 after the group signed a recording contract with Decca Records. The single revealed a band clearly in the thralls of a Procol Harum fixation, with its layered keyboards and nostalgic lyrics.

A second single followed a year later, but ‘Ice Man’ also failed to impress commercially. Both singles have been compiled on numerous psychedelic compilations. The band was later joined by expressive vocalist Linda Hoyle and pursued a jazz rock direction under the new name of Affinity. Serpell was later a founder member of Sailor.

This is a very nice album of psychedelic baroque pop. Hope you enjoy.
(By the way: I hated and still hate Sailor. I'm NOT kidding lol)
Cheers
           Frank  mp3@320

Power Pop From 20/20! 20/20 (1979) and Look Out (1981) 2 albums on 1 disc (2012) @320

20/20 & Look Out

With the benefit of hindsight, there’s a couple of different ways of looking at the first two albums from LA-by-way-of-OK New Wave power poppers 20/20: there’s founding members Steve Allen and Ron Flynt’s early years in the Sooner State, crossing paths with the similarly-minded Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour (who lit out for El Lay and scored big with “I’m On Fire”); the move to Los Angeles and ‘78 debut single on Greg Shaw’s Bomp! label (“Giving It All” b/w “Under the Freeway”); the ‘79 rising-tide-lifts-all-boats assist from the Knack’s “My Sharona” that helped 20/20 score a deal with CBS subsidiary Portrait… whew. Y’all caught up?
As for the albums themselves, 1979’s 20/20 and ‘81’s Look Out!” combine to form a textbook case of a breezy, clever, classic power pop album—a standout even in an era where albums like this came out on what feels like a near-weekly basis—and its difficult, belabored follow-up. 20/20’s reputation in power pop circles rests almost solely on their eponymous debut, and, specifically, on their gem of a track “Yellow Pills” (which, of course, Jordan Oakes used to title his power pop fanzine/album compilations), a four-minute ode to uppers and top-of-the-world youth, augmented by a nervy guitar lead and glints of synthesizer. If you haven’t listened to the tune in a while, it’s tougher-edged than you remember. That said, there’s hardly a duff track on the debut: “Tonight We Fly” flirts with boogie rock; the jangly (of course!) “Remember the Lightning” captures that first moment a girl strikes your fancy, and a few darker tunes—the (admittedly stalker-ish) “She’s An Obsession” and “Leaving Your World Behind”—leaven the saccharine rush-of-love-and-youth jams. It’s easy to forget from the vantage point of 2012-13, that power pop wasn’t always frozen in amber, that flesh and blood young guys were out there making it up as they went along, and 20/20 is one of the genre’s finest examples of that.

And then there’s Look Out!, a perfectly cromulent record whose chief role is to further the glory of its predecessor. Ignoring the maxim to strike while the iron was hot, the band took nearly 15 months to birth Look Out! (and lost a drummer and traded in producer Earle Mankey, of Sparks fame, for Richard Podolor). Despite the outward-facing title, Look Out! is a deeply claustrophobic, interior record, full of paranoia and discontent. The spectre of a mushroom cloud hangs over opener “Nuclear Boy” and things don’t get much brighter from there: A woman helps an alien who lands in Cleveland (not Howard the Duck), who when splits for the West Coast on “Alien”; the narrator of “The Night I Heard A Scream” witnesses a hit and run accident and “Mobile Unit 245” revisits the Vietnam War, which had ended only six year earlier. Thematically, the record is all over the place.

The darker lyrical turn and tougher sound rarely plays to the band’s strengths: charming power pop with some New Wave keyboards. That said, the Springsteenian (or Springsteen-parody) “Life in the USA” and the closing “American Dream”, ticking off the isolation of freeways, microwaves and “television suicide”, as well as asking the prickly question, “Don’t you want to be a part of anything?”, offer an interesting Third Way for the band: the sardonic power pop song—and it’s funny to think that Black Flag, just a few miles down the road, were also playing the American Disillusionment card… and that both bands stole it from Creedence’s “Ramble Tamble”.

To these ears, Look Out! marks one of the bigger sophomore slumps in rock—overwrought, overcooked and trying too hard to Say Something. It’s an interesting failure, and one too rarely seen in these play-it-safe days. Allen and Flynt released three more albums under the 20/20 banner in the ensuing years, but never recaptured their early magic. Hopefully a few ears will find their way to this first-time-on-CD release.

Second post of power pop from the change of the decades from the 70's to the 80's.
I remember this time i was quite disatisfied with the music in these days. Sure, some good things was around but where were all the good things punk had promised a few years ago? The save of my (musical) soul came with a sound i listened more and more in these days...power pop. But enough of old stories from the past lol, enjoy these two albums, for me they are the strongest the band ever did
Cheers
           Frank     mp3@320

End 70's, early 80's Powerpop! The A's - The A's & A Woman's Got The Power (1979 - 1981) mp3

When punk rock exploded on the scene, the Sex Pistols brought it in with an angst, sense of rebellion, and shock value that became hard to match. The bands that followed worked in various segments of the genre, searching for an identity and individuality. This eventually gave birth to a style that became known as new wave. Still, the boundaries and sensibilities of that style were hard to define. The A's came out of this era, forging their own path. Along with groups like the Dickies, they combined the irreverence of punk rock with a fun sort of texture and a pop sensibility, and, most importantly, a sense of humor. Their music forged a path that encompassed power pop, punk, and a retro, almost mod, texture.

They did it with accessible hooks and catchy numbers. It is really a shame that this group never achieved the level of fame that they should have, because their musical sensibilities bordered on flawless. As a slice of time from this era, their debut release really works well to this day. The other thing about this album that really pleases is that it is just plain fun. This band is really one that should have been somebody, but seemed to have been caught in an awkward time of musical indecision.

Here is an other quote:  The often perceptive dude from Badcat records had this to say about their debut album: "Formed in 1978, Philadelphia's The A's featured the talents of bassist Terry Bortman, singer Richard Bush, lead guitarist Rick DiFonzo, keyboardist Rocco Notte, and drummer Mikey Snyder.  The band's live shows quickly garnered them a loyal local following (you can still find a slew of fawning on-line reviews from folks who saw the band's early shows).  That in turn captured the attention of Clive Davis' Arista label which was on the lookout for new wave talent.  While The A's weren't really a new wave act, they were close enough for Arista management which quickly signed them to a recording contract.   They were quickly teamed with producer Rick Chertoff  going into New York's The Record Plant Studios to record 1979's cleverly-titled "The A's".   So leave it to a city like Philadelphia to spawn a bunch of guys who thought they were punks, but had a repertoire full of songs that were creative, lyrically intriguing, funny, and highly commercial.  Judging by the leather jacket drenched album cover, Bush (the only one member not wearing Ramones-styled leather) and company seemingly thought they were channeling English new-wave bands like The Boomtown Rats, or The Undertones (I know they were Irish), but the fact of the matter is The A's were really a first rate power-pop band.  Yeah, there wasn't a great deal of originality spread across these ten original numbers, but propelled by Bush's tawny, raw voice tracks like 'After Last Night', 'Teenage Jerk Off' and 'Grounded' had far more energy and enthusiasm than virtually all of the competition – imagine The Hooters with a new-wave edge, or a more urbane, jittery version of The Dwight Twilley Band, or a tougher version of The Cars and you'd have some idea of what to expect" 

Great powerpop from the end of the 70's and the beginning of the 80's. Both albums on one disc. Don't miss it and enjoy!
Cheers
           Frank  mp3@vbr~256