Shane Rennison – Long Road
A pop song is a pop song is a pop song. But, sometimes, against the odds, pop songs happen to be good. Sometimes, they do what they’re supposed to – instantly change your mood and the way your brain cells interact with each other.
This promise of undiscovered rhymes, grooves, and soulfulness is why record collectors, hopeless dreamers, and musicians alike go back to pop songs. Usually, they are disappointed and return to their other concerns.
And then, by the time you’ve tried a thousand different flavours and found none satisfying, you come upon something that makes you whistle along, tap your foot and play it again. That’s a pop song!
Shane Rennison makes pop music. “Long Road” proves that, and there ain’t nothing that the singer-songwriter would like to try to convince you that he’s doing differently. But on “Long Road”, he captures something. It’s that fine dose of anger and madness that can be poured into a pop song and improve it. Anything more would turn it into something else. Anything less would make it just another radio-chasing jingle. Nah, Rennison traps that feeling here and kicks it out of the park. On the rare occasion that this happens, pop music ain’t so bad.
Mt. Misery – Hey
Well, people of the future won’t be able to make sense of many of the things that we do. They won’t understand the endless scrolling, the reason we transform certain folks into stars, or why exactly we ate all that terrible food in such extraordinary quantities. Historians of the future and comedians will have a lot of material about just how ridiculous these times really were.
But don’t worry. Some things get translated really easily through the days and years. There are jokes written by writers of antiquity that may still make you smile. You can still follow along with a cookbook from that same period. And what about guitar music? I’m confident that listeners of the future will be looking for some of the same things that thrilled us.
Mt. Misery is a band that truly loves the sweet jingle-jangle sounds of early American rock. “Hey” is as charming as can be and as straightforward. And, besides the excellent vocal harmonies, this is where the band is looking to win you over. Mt. Misery’s members aren’t pretending to be cooler than they are, not even when they are impersonating Weezer in their retro-looking music video. Nah, the band just loves love songs played on jingle jangle guitars. Even future comedians will be able to appreciate that.
