No MP3 Monday this week, as I was up in Seattle this weekend for a wedding. But an update on an old one.
On May 15 I posted about The Trend, a terrific Missouri power-pop band active in the early 1980s. Today, I got an email from its leader-turned-lawyer, John McMullan.
“We have been very fortunate to have been given a tremendous ‘reminder’ by our inclusion in the newest Yellow Pills, and the feedback has been uniformly positive,” he says.
On to my write-up. For starters, I’d assumed an early R.E.M. connection (“You can tell they listened to Chronic Town, but the burbling bass and speed-freak drums say they were up to something of their own”). Not so, apparently:
[T]o my knowledge, none of us had ever heard Chronic Town prior to the recording of the album. I know that I became familiar with R.E.M. during the summer of ’83. (Our album was recorded in July, 1982.) Later demos of ours included guitar sounds derived directly from Peter Buck, but our album was mined from an odd Monkees/Records/Shoes/Fools Face combination. We weren’t sophisticated enough for R.E.M. at that moment!
And as to my in-retrospect-not-particularly-generous comment on his later work:
I happen to agree with your truism that power pop artists do not age well. In fact, none of them, including myself, retain the urgency required to play true power pop well. Maybe it’s a metabolism thing, or a domesticity thing, but it’s true. In fact, most of my favorite power pop acts never even made a 2nd album that I really liked!
For kicks, I’m reposting the Trend song that initially grabbed my attention, “(I Feel Like A) Dictionary.”