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
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. 
