my power pop addiction, no. 62 (134)

Sex Clark Five, a quartet, actually, from Huntsville, Alabama, made arty power pop, often of a hyper-intellectualized variety, which is not typically a sub-sub-genre I relate well to, but their melodic chops are so good that I find them hard to resist. Tonight’s song, with its changes in time signature and epic, politicized lyrics, might even be characterized as progressive pop. I tend to think of pop and prog as being on opposite ends of the spectrum, but SC5 have a hand in both. You can really see why they never gained much attention beyond college radio and a few nerdy critics here and there. It’s pretty heady stuff. But they’re a band that can do many things well. While Sarajevo is filled with musical and thematic complexity, there are other tracks on Strum and Drum that simply channel the Beatles and the Byrds in fairly straight-forward ways, with maybe just a wrinkle or two in a few places. …SC5’s studio sound is a bit lo-fi for my taste, but again their wonderful melodies and obvious love of music trump all else and make them one of the very best guitar pop bands to have come out of the South...