my power pop addiction, no. 76 (148)

I’m hearing Squeeze again for the first time in years and years. I don’t know why I’ve stayed away for so long. All their albums are patchy, but each has at least three devastatingly great tracks. Pound for pound, the gems on East Side Story are perhaps less shimmering than those on Argybargy, but In Quintessence is a power pop classic for the ages, so compact and precise, a perfect album opener that sets the tone for a delightful listening experience. Sometimes a patchy album is actually preferable. With pop, as opposed to rock, the emphasis is on the artistry of the song, not the album, and great songs on an otherwise patchy album are often more impactful and dramatic. That’s the thing about albums. They’re a by-product of the transition from pop to rock and symptomatic of growing bombast and self-importance. The first few Beatles albums are really just warehouses for singles and filler. The filler is like sonic wallpaper while the singles are sublime paintings mounted atop the wallpaper. The single is the thing until about 1965. Rubber Soul is probably the first record designed to work as an album, and in this respect it marks the passage of the Beatles from a pop band to a rock band. This is true even though they continue to make pop songs, the difference now being that the music has pretensions to aesthetic seriousness. Drugs made people more self-conscious and more serious. With the appearance of double albums, from Freak Out and Blonde on Blonde, to Tommy, to Exile on Main Street, along with the occasional triple album, like the slog fest that is All Things Must Pass, the era of rock reaches its zenith, and therefore reaches its nadir as well. The great material on rock albums often gets muddled and lost in the crowd. Can you honestly differentiate much between the songs on Quadrophenia? ...Power pop returns the focus to the song, perhaps as a kind of nostalgia for when everything wasn’t so fucked up and complicated, but it’s a healthy corrective turn all the same, and no band I know of can match Squeeze’s feel for self-contained pop. Their breezy self-confidence is like the freshest breath of fresh air and gives the music a golden glow…