Going back to the foundation of my music taste, which will always be melodic guitar pop and power pop. These two excellent releases have injected plenty of that sort of greatness into this surprisingly hot Finnish summer.
First we have The Legal Matters from Michigan. The cover might not be the most inspiring I’ve seen, but inside you will find a huge amount of melodic pop treats. Of course that was totally expected, because the members Andy Reed, Chris Richards and Keith Klingensmith have written a lot of fabulous pop music in different shapes and forms over the years I’ve been following US power pop. I would say this one is monstrously highly recommended, if you want to use that Not Lame scale. I would be rather surprised if I don’t find this one on the end of year lists of every power pop -orientated blog/website. It’s that good. This one is Rite Of Spring from the new The Legal Matters album.
And here’s another recent pop treasure. Jam Records released the new The Britannicas album High Tea a few weeks ago. The Britannicas is a really international pop group. The band members are Joe Algeri from Australia, Herb Eimerman from USA and Magnus Karlsson from Sweden. Plus special guest Stefan Johansson from Sweden. These days you can live in different continents and still create magnificent pop music together. All three tunesmiths have written four originals and on top of that you get a Del Shannon cover I Got You. There’s a a lot of sweet pop jangle, a bit of psychedelic west coast pop of the sixties, some Kinks-y rockers. Well just all kinds of fabulous melodic pop music. You can listen to the whole thing on their bandcamp page. I selected Karlsson’s Talkin’ ’bout Summer below, because it’s just insanely hot in Finland right now (Maybe not by Australia’s standards)