Aural Fixations

EVELYN FOREVER
Good To Be Alive
(Airplay)
Power pop, with its hook-friendly song structures, loud guitars and harmony-rich presentation, seems like a genre impossible to dislike. But there are issues. First and foremost is the lack of melodic invention in the genre. Let's face it, most power poppers are content to recycle the same chord changes and riff structures as every other band, and those changes and structures are already shamelessly derived from The Big 10.¹ This wouldn't be so bad except that the proliferation of these derivative melodies makes them impossible to distinguish from one another, and has the effect of making them all sound washed-out and uninteresting. Somehow some of the most memorable melodies become faceless.

The second thing is related to the first: most power pop bands have an inability to write an entire album's worth of good songs. Arguably this is a problem with every genre of music, but, for me at least, it's particularly endemic to power pop. Maybe it's because a lot of contemporary power poppers started out in punk, a style of rock some have argued should never have stomped out of the confines of the 7-inch single. Finally, power pop writers' obsession with simplistic themes like cars and girls has really started to grate over the years. Love is indeed the universal subject, but there's a difference between adult love and teenage infatuation, and most power poppers seem hell-bent on recapturing the spirit of the latter rather than deal with the realities of the former, even when the participants are in the 40s. This leads to unhealthy speculation about said participants' desire for eternal youth and the alleged power of rock 'n' roll to grant it. But that's a subject for another time.

The result of all this is scores of power pop albums that have one decent, occasionally great song and whole passels of boring filler. There are significant exceptions², of course, but 75% of the power pop records that cross the landscape could have been boiled down to a one-sided single. Power pop as a genre has its bright lights³, but for the most part it's a zombie resurrected by baby boomer voodoo doctors who never got over the Beatles' breakup and Cheap Trick's descent into AOR hackwork.

So why is Evelyn Forever's new album Good To Be Alive so gosh-darned good? There's little on here that hasn't been done before—familiar melodies and guitar riffs, conventional vocal harmonies, the usual songs about getting, keeping and losing girls. But they do it all with such spirited enthusiasm and slavish devotion to maximizing melody that they destroy any hint of an attempt to visit the past. To these young men, power pop is here and now, it's happening, it's their purest form of self-expression. "Imagine My Surprise," "I Know a Girl" and the remarkable "Indecision" ('N'Sync with guitars!) aren't desperate attempts to regain innocence—they're genuinely innocent. (Note: innocent, not naive. There's a big difference.) The boys also know how to add just the right effect to lift their genre-perfect creations above the norm—dig the "Eight Miles High" 12-string solo and castanets in "Little Girl," the bedroom acoustic guitars and bongos of the lovely "Maybe," the percolating drum loop of "Indecision." Little touches like these make all the difference.

Best of all, Evelyn Forever avoids the songwriting problem completely—every one of the dozen songs here proudly sports a memorable melody, the kind that sticks in your brain after one listen and grows there like a tumor. From the bouncy "Drunk Tank" and "Champagne" (yes, not one, but two songs about the ill effects of alcohol) to the hard rocking "Everything" and the anthemic, Mott the Hoople-ish title track, the quartet fires on all melodic cylinders, crossing the finish line with every lap. There's not a song here that doesn't ring true, despite any misgivings about the genre. A strong melody and enthusiastic sincerity will triumph every time. Michael Toland

For fans of: Badfinger, the Hollies, Jack & the Beanstalk