The jam session where Paul McCartney, Ray Davies, Rivers Cuomo, Billy Joe Armstrong, Eddie Van Halen and Keith Moon happened to stumble upon the perfect Pop song.

12 MP3 Songs
POP: Power Pop, ROCK: Modern Rock



Details:
Glancing at The Power Cordsâ debut album, oneâs eye moves past the flickering television screen on the cover to the subversive words imprinted coyly along the album's spine: âFile Under: Post Post Rock.â Naturally we wonder, are these guys kidding? The record plays. The answer, of course, is yes.

This young Los Angeles quartet serves up infectious confections of irresistibly digestible sound, layered generously with lovingly distorted guitars, tight harmonies, and those beautiful little serendipitous touches in songwriting and production that distinguish mere competent performance from musical revelation. The twelve songs on the LP harken back to a time when surfer girls caught waves in glorious Technicolor, when Kinks and Zombies and Turtles werenât yet extinct.

The Power Cords are the inheritors and stewards â self-consciously so â of a long, illustrious tradition. They are fervent, pious believers in the elusive and mythical Pop Song. They are Beatle-thumpers, if you will. Above all they remind us again what the first and most indispensable role of the pop song is, has been, and must always be so long as pop will retain its vitality: to liberate a listener for two or three minutes from the tedious concerns of daily life.

To this end their lyrics blur the line between cheeky and downright whimsical, eschewing melodramatic posturing in favor of an incandescent landscape populated by science babes and superheroes. They tell simple stories to deceptively breezy melodies, the sort of friendly tunes that find their way back into oneâs consciousness in the middle of a shower or a long elevator ride. And they wrap it all in a shell of playful egotism, branding themselves the vanguard of rock evolution and the present and future arbiters of musical relevance.

Still, their faux pretense is more than just an easy laugh at the expense of insufferable phonies. The Power Cords take their pop inheritance very seriously. Their talk of âpost-post rockâ reflects a powerful and constant awareness of the history of pop, commitment to the canon that they shamelessly espouse, and steadfast opposition to the ego-serving artifices that have weighed down the pop vessel. In a music scene filled with slow-working poisons and boring placebos, their songs are Flintstones chewable vitamins: colorful, cartoony, healthy, and delicious.

Listening to The Power Cords leads one to conclude with no small relief that post-post rock sounds a lot like, well... rock. The Power Cords are proclaiming earnestly that weâve moved past the dead-end pseudo-intellectualism of âpost-rock.â The Power Cords aim to reclaim the soul of pop. Itâs a lofty goal, but their craft is strong enough to quell our knee-jerk cynicism.

Ultimately, The Power Cords are making the case for pop. Theyâre persuasive. Listen to the music, come see them play. Theyâll make the skeptic sing. Just try, for a moment, to suspend your disbelief.

-Bill Higgins