Top 5 - Daniel Aloi
1) Martin Luther Lennon, Music for a World Without Limitations (NotLame): Insanely great, crazily catchy pure pop from a Southern California madman. Tony Perkins (his real name) leads a crack band and reels out 12 hook-happy tunes as he sings from the point of view of a schoolyard sniper, a gun-happy NRA zealot, a high schooler with a devastating crush, and a guy who badly wants his medication. All in good fun, at least musically.
2) Whiskeytown, Stranger's Almanac (Outpost/Geffen). Signed after No Depression magazine flat-out loved their 1996 indie release Faithless Street and sponsored a national tour, this Raleigh, N.C. band has seen two major lineup changes since that album was recorded. But the ever-popular tortured artist effect is still in place for young twentysomething singer and songwriter, Ryan Adams. His high and lonesome romantic pleas, set to fiddle and pedal steel tears, are born of quiet and cathartic desperation -- from "16 Days" and "Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart" to "Waiting to Derail." Less rock and twang than sturm und drang, but I like it. And somehow, not quite as downcast as Son Volt.
3) Beat Angels, Red Badge of Discourage (Epiphany). The kind of power pop band I could only dream about before it actually existed - in Tempe, Arizona, yet, home of overmatched bar bands like the Gin Blossoms. The Beat Angels' 10-song followup to "Unhappy Hour" quotes liberally from the Who, Kinks and a vinyl melting pot of '70s poptopia (their logo even apes Cheap Trick). Guitarist Michael Brooks, singer Brian Smith and their pals are on a mission of retro-awareness in bashing "Saturday Punks" ("dumber than junk/Don't even know about Strummer and Jones") and in other nasty little digs Smith takes in songs like "My Glum Sugar-Plum" ("She looked like Marianne Faithfull in 1967..."). Probably the best album The Figgs never made.
4) Saturnhead, Introducing... Arizona's Thin Mistake (Resolution). Vancouverite Terry Miles (guitarist for Cinnamon / The Kelley Affair) hunkered down all alone with his 4-track in mid-1996, and came up with this -- 43 perfectly realized song snippets that add up to a conceptual spin across a nonexistent AM dial. Miles did it all -- save for one of the songs, from Marq DeSouza's 4-track, and a couple of background vocals. And it's incredible, as a sequence of unvarnished little pop gems that don't sound "lo-fi" at all. Lots of Beatles-Kinks-Big Star touches; listen for the Bowie tribute "The Golden Age of Mars." The newest Minus 5 album almost won this slot in my list, for the same variety, Kinks-like concept and execution -- albeit with studio time, an all-star band and longer and fewer songs. This seemed the more worthy achievement.
5) Ben Folds Five, Whatever And Ever Amen (Sony 550). A Chapel Hill, N.C. songwriter whose young, brash, very '90s attitude rests atop an amalgam of piano-pop influences - Gershwin and Todd Rundgren, Elton John and Joe Jackson, Vince Guaraldi and many more. You won't find too many popular songs that say "Kiss my ass - goodbye" ("One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces") and "Fuck you too -- giveme my money back, give me money back, you bitch" ("Song for the Dumped"). Neither will you find many melodies as achingly beautiful as "Brick," "Fair" and "Smoke." A trio, not a quintet -- and one of my favorite live bands of the past two years. In them I find new hope for pop music being popular again.
