Sometimes half is more than enough

By Henry Lipput

If you remember listening to AM radio in the ‘60s and early ‘70s (before you had a receiver that allowed you to get free-form FM radio), not only are you getting to be pretty old now but you know what it was like to hear blast after blast of pop tunes.

Well that’s what you get with Pop Treasures (Big Stir Records) an exceedingly cool collection of songs that were released over a span of 50 years and now covered by The Half-Cubes. The Half-Cubes are, as their name suggests, half of Power Pop Hall of Famers The Flashcubes. On Pop Treasures Gary Frenay (drums and lead vocals) and Tommy Allen (bass and acoustic guitar) of The Flashcubes get a little help from the guitar army of Randy Klawson and Fernando Perdomo.

Throughout Pop Treasures The Half-Cubes revel in not only showing a real affection for these songs but also amping up the pop quotient in each of them as the band hopscotches from decade to decade. 

The album kicks off with a blast with a cover of “Love’s Melody” by The Motors (which was already a cover of the Searchers’ original).  “I Live,” a solo track by Jason Faulkner, following his stint with the short -lived but much -loved group The Grays in the mid-90s, has much the same feel as the songs he wrote for that group. Del Amitri’s “Not Where It’s At” is from the same decade and it’s a cool song to include in this collection and, like so many of the songs on Pop Treasures, will encourage listeners to discover the bands and artists who first recorded them. The ‘70s are represented a lot including “Let Me Make Love to You” by Flo & Eddie.

Those are just some of the songs covered by the core Half-Cubes band but for me the highlights (your results may vary) are the songs in which guests – many of which played on the original recordings – bring their still formidable skills to the music.

Bob Pernice, one half of the actual biological Pernice Brothers, contributes his guitar once again to 2003’s gorgeous “Weakest Shade of Blue” from my album of that year Yours, Mine & Ours. 

John Rubin and Tommy Dunbar of The Rubinoos are on board for the power pop gem that is “The Girl.” Two songs by former Raspberries lead vocalist and songwriter Eric Carmen are included on Pop Treasures one covered by The Half-Cubes (“Someday”) and the other one, “My Girl,” brings on Darian Sahanaja, Matt Jardine, and Jim Laspesa. All of these gentlemen have had long relationships with Brian Wilson and they bring out the Beach Boys sound of Carmen’s original.

There are also some interesting choices of songs for The Half-Cubes to cover including “Souvenir” by Orchestral Manoeuveres in the Dark – but it works.

Sadly Beautiful

By Henry Lipput

I usually don’t write about albums that have been made available for pre-order because there are always a bunch of other releases waiting for me to listen to and write about. But I feel it’s a special case with the brilliant new collection Certain Memories (Subjangle) by the UK band Assistant. So I’ve decided to do a quick take on the album with a full review next year after it’s been officially released.

According to the album's Bandcamp page there’s going to be a very limited run of lathe-cut vinyl (50 but as of yesterday morning a quarter had already been purchased) and 125 CDs (Subjangle occasionally does a second run based on demand but I wouldn’t wait for that).

One of my favorite Replacement songs is “Sadly Beautiful” from the All Shook Down album. The song sounds just as you think it would be based on the title. It’s also the feel you get listening to Certain Memories with its songs full of sadness and loneliness. Certain Memories is the first new album by Assistant since their fourth album 2022’s This World Could Be So Much Fun (all four albums have been reissued by Subjangle in double CD sets and you can check them out here). And if you’re asking what the band has been doing since This World Could Be So Much Fun? It’s obvious they’ve been living and dealing with everything that came their way to produce what very much looks like an early entry for one of the best albums of 2025.

Another Halloween treat from The Jack Rubies

By Henry Lipput

It’s scary how good this song sounds. The Jack Rubies’ new single “Phantom” (Big Stir Records) is a follow up of sorts to this year’s “Poltergeist” from the terrific Clocks Are Out Of Time album (their first in 30 years).

“Phantom” is a song that celebrates and acknowledges a time of year filled with monsters and goblins but would also, at any other time, be a major dance club hit. It’s certainly early enough in the year for the DJs in the know to pick up on this and make it part of their set (where's my 12-inch remix?). And the song is as much about the spirits that haunt us as it’s about relationships that end and create a haunted house with someone who is no longer a part of your life and seen out of the corner of your eye.

The sound of “Phantom” recalls the sounds of The Jack Rubies' original contemporaries like The Boomtown Rats (especially Mondo Bongo). There’s also some more time travel going on in the video for the song in which the band dons masks of their younger selves.

Here's the video:

Don’t mess with Carla

By Henry Lipput

You know it’s bad enough for you when you get a knock on the door or a call from a bill collector or the police but it’s even worse when it’s because you’ve done Carla Olson wrong. Especially when she has Tall Poppy Syndrome backing her up.

On the brand-new collaboration “Is It True?” (Tres Melo Musique/Carla Olson Productions) Olson joins the TPS to give a fresh coat of rock and roll paint to a Brenda Lee classic from 1964. Tall Poppy Syndrome adds some fuzz to the guitars to add a sense of menace to Olson’s take-no-prisoners vocal and backing vocals from the TPS lads bring a real 60s sound to the mix. Olson means business and makes it clearer than Brenda did that you better not have been missing around.

A solo outing

By Henry Lipput

Although the London-based glam rock band Tremendous is on hiatus, main man Mark Dudzinski isn’t wasting any time in releasing new music. His 6 song EP, Transcendence On The Cheap (digital vendors and streaming services), is, in his words, “a straight-up, stripped-down acoustic affair.”

The EP is made up of all new songs and, as special as they are right now, it’s easy to imagine how terrific they will sound when his band takes the stage to glam them up a bit more (can we look forward to a  live Transcendence Part II?). “Innocent Soho,” one of my favorite songs on the EP, is the seemingly lovely tune but turns out to be about a scary evening in a rough part of the city.

One of the first songs I heard from Tremendous was 2018’s “Rock n’ Roll Satellite.” I liked the idea that they had merged power pop and glam rock. But on Transcendence On The Cheap there’s less Raspberries and more T Rex. In fact with Dudzinski on acoustic guitar the new EP sounds like a solo Marc Bolan trying out new songs on a John Peel BBC session that never happened.

The song of the lonely living room dancer

By Henry Lipput

“When The Radio Plays” (Jangleshop Records) is the second single by Shapes Like People, the husband-and-wife duo of Carl Mann and Kat Mann, from next year’s Ticking Haze album.

Like Paul McCartney’s “Another Day” and The Pearlfishers’ “Love & Other Hopeless Things” Shapes Like People blends both happiness and melancholy. And it has one of my favorite opening lyrics of any recent song:

Happiness comes and goes like buses

If only I was on time.

Kat’s vocal hits both the joy and sadness in a song about a woman who is always missing the chance to find love but keeps up her spirits by dancing to her favorite songs when they’re played on the radio. With Carl’s chunky guitar riffs and cool synth strings the song is not far from the disco songs that occasionally make her happy.

Carl, of the UK band The Shop Window, has said he “needed a female vocal for some demos he planned to pitch to other artists. To get a feel for what they might sound like he asked Kat to sing and relace his guide vocals but couldn’t bring himself to part with the songs afterwards.” And so Shapes Like People was born.

A little touch of Bacino in the night

By Henry Lipput

To paraphrase the great humorist S.J. Perelman: “I don’t know much about Nilsson but I know what I like.”

The little I know about the late, great Harry Nilsson is based on having a copy of the Essential Nilsson collection on CD, a used vinyl copy of The Point soundtrack, and reading about how Lennon and McCartney were big fans of his work (Nilsson recorded a Fabs-related song called “You Can’t Do That” made up of lyrics from Beatle songs).

Mark Bacino’s new album Top Of The World (Bandcamp) is a pleasure to listen to and although Nilsson’s name is never mentioned, it’s through and through a love letter to Harry’s pop stylings and sensibility.  The second track, “Flop Of The World,” with its pacing, vocal, and piano and tuba arrangement, recalls classic Nilsson. 

With this song as well as “Why Does This Woman Love Me?,” “Shaky Hand,” “I Like Wearing Clothes.” and “How The Story Ends” we have a bumper crop of what would have been radio hits in the '60s and '70s. And if you think I’m making any of this up, when I mentioned the Nilsson connection to Bacino in a Twitter DM exchange he replied: “There’s definitely a decent amount of Harry vibe on this record.”

Along with the Harry vibes on Top Of The World Bacino also provides some stand-alone pop tunes like the opener “Kaylee Hughes” a horn-driven, toe tapper. And “Not That Guy” hits all the right notes in how to put together a pop earworm.

A cool pop ode to an LGBTQ+ icon

By Henry Lipput

The London band Sassyhiya sounds as if the NYC band Television had a female lead singer and a sense of humor (with some very early Go-Betweens riffs thrown in for good measure).

Sassyhiya (the name works both as a greeting and a personal mission statement) is led by the both real-life and musical partners Kathy Wright and Helen Skinner (“now with added Neil and Pablo” as their Bandcamp page puts it). Of their latest single “Kristen Stewart” (Skep Wax) Helen, a long-time fan of the lesbian icon/pin up, says “I wanted to do a song about her because I think she’s ace and makes great choices when it comes to roles.”

The result is the very cool pop ode and the video not only chronicles a near real-life encounter between Helen and the actress but also celebrates Stewart’s bold fashion choices.

Sassyhiya’s album Take You Somewhere will be released by Skep Wax on November 8^th.

The Unpredictable Mr. Ryan

By Henry Lipput

With his new album, Retro Metro (Think Like A Key Music), Scotland’s SUPER 8 -- aka Trip aka Paul Ryan -- continues to delight and surprise us, as he’s been doing for the last six years, and he keeps us guessing about what he has up his musical sleeve.

In 2018 he released his first album T-T-T-Technicolor Melodies and as someone at the time wrote for CoolDad Music the album: “has the charm of a home-made, one-man-in-a-studio production like Paul McCartney and Emitt Rhodes.” And that was that because we were used to waiting at least another year or two for a musician’s next album.

But SUPER 8 began his unpredictable ways as he released that same year not one but two albums of completely new material with each one (Turn Around Or… and HI/LO) being better than the one before. (I just want to point out that as far as I know – and you can let me know if I’m wrong – no one since The Beatles in 1964 and 1965 produced three albums in a year.)

Soon after this musical hat trick SUPER 8 began a collaboration with California-based power popper Lisa Mychols with the groovy single “Timebomb.” They never sat in the same room working on music and lyrics but instead traded files across multiple time zones, a practice which is something done by a lot of folks now but seemed to be very new at the time. Trip and Mychols also put out a self-titled album in 2020 and continue to work together as LMS8 – their latest single is the recent “Love Connection.”

SUPER 8’s Raindrops On Roses album contained a lot of covers which had already been on his albums but also included, as he surprised all of us, his version of a 1970’s Lennon demo that – at the time – The Twotles had yet to release. Legends – A Tribute to Astrud was another unpredictable album as SUPER 8’s tribute to his band of the 1990’s that toured the UK with these songs but never got into a studio to record them.

On the brand new album Retro Metro he does it again. He opens it with an instrumental theme song – when was the last time anyone did that? And at the end of 2023 a retro-60’s band The Plus 4 released a few tracks. But it wasn’t long before the cat was out of the hat and the word was that The Plus 4 was really SUPER 8. He’s own up to it and it’s not only now part of his canon but now the songs are on Retro Metro and everyone can hear how cool they are!

Back around the time T-T-T-Technicolor Melodies came out there were some early SUPER 8 videos on YouTube. One of them was for a lovely song about a female friend but it didn’t appear of this first album. It did, however, show up on Turn Around Or … and was one of my favorite tracks. So it was a big surprise to find “Mary Jane,” dusted off and performed anew, on Retro Metro – sort of like a full circle for the song.

Radio Days

By Henry Lipput

It’s been five years since California’s The Black Watch released 31 Years of Obscurity their amazing collection of what the band had been doing for the previous three decades (I know I’ve said this before but you really need to check it out). And in the last five years The Black Watch, rather than resting on their laurels, have given us five more albums not to mention multiple singles and EPs.

The latest from The Black Watch is weird rooms (ATOM Records) where they are again led by singer, songwriter, and guitarist (and novelist) John Andrew Fredrick. Leaving California for Austin, Texas, to record the new album, Fredrick brought his gear and his guitarist son Chandler on a road trip to producer Misa Bullock’s studio. (My imagined road trip is suggested by the brief bursts of radio stations along the way that pepper the album.)

The sessions became something of a family affair with Sara Minsavage-Bullock, the producer’s wife, providing backing vocals on a few songs. (In the Bandcamp notes for weird rooms, Misa is described as “carrying on more duties than most mortals can accomplish” as he was responsible for drums, bass, percussion, guitar, keyboards, and string arrangements. Slacker.)

The Black Watch is known for its dream pop sound and there’s plenty of that on weird rooms. And although it’s not always clear where Fredrick’s influences come from, it’s more than a bit obvious in the album’s first song “Myrmidon.” With its pacing, production, and hazy backing vocals it very much seems to be a nod in the direction of "Dear Prudence" (and at the end there are brief “Walrus”-like strings).  The dream continues with “Miles and Miles” with a spoken word foreign-language voice talking to you while you’re asleep and thinking about a place and a time you’ve never been.

On “Gobbledegook” the band gives us an example of a different kind of classic Black Watch pop gem. Sarah Minsavage-Bullock is heard for the first time as she adds wonderful backing vocals to Fredrick’s lead. Another Black Watch sound is Fredrick’s acoustic guitar and on the title song there’s a terrific interplay of electric guitars (John Andrew and Chandler?).

The dream and the pop are combined on “Swallowed” which highlights some high-quality drumming from Misa who also shines with his string arrangement for the lovely ballad “You’ll Get Over It.”

Girl-group inspired new single from LMS8

Henry Lipput

LMS8 has just released “Love Connection,” a groovy new single on Bandcamp. Who, you may be wondering, exactly is this LMS8 you speak of?

You may know the folks behind LMS8 as the very much missed power pop duo Lisa Mychols and SUPER 8. The pair’s first trans-Atlantic collaboration was the fabulous single “Time Bomb” and culminated in 2020’s Trip & Ellie’s self-titled summer blast (Mychols also contributed to SUPER 8’s out-of-this-world Universal Journey in 2022).

Back together again for the first time since then, the duo has just given us “Love Connection.” It’s a girl-group inspired romp with Mychols, after taking some time for herself, is ready to “move on to a Love Connection” but without the games she’s had to deal with in the past. And SUPER 8? It’s all his hands on deck as he once again is playing all the instruments and providing some cool deep-voiced background vocals as well.  

And there’s a video too.

Five songs in it looks like Colonizing the Cosmos is putting together a new album

By Henry Lipput

Back in 2010 I saw the Pittsburgh indie pop band Colonizing the Cosmos at a fundraiser for a local public radio station. I was knocked out and bought their latest album, The First Frontier, on the spot. It was my favorite album of the year.

Since then the band hasn't done much according to their Bandcamp page. But in October of last year the band released the wonderful “So Robo” a love song to the voice on a robo call. Yeah it’s a weird topic for a song but it has the bouncy, futuristic sound of The Final Frontier.

Last year also came “Made Up” and “Eyes Like A Swan” and two more singles arrived on Bandcamp this year (“Buzzards Bay” and “Clean Up”). When I saw the band in 2010 it was a full line up with horns and everything. Currently the band consists of Josh Moyer and Michael Savinsky but they’re still making a joyful noise. And with five songs under their belt it looks as if we might actually have their first new album since 2013'sThe House of War is the House of Peace.. And I for one can’t wait.

The first single from the new Greg Williams album is reviewed and he answers the Pure Pop Phive

By Henry Lipput

Australia’s Greg Williams has been known in his home country for his work with the band Splurge where he was principal songwriter and lead vocalist.

Williams is about to release Stone on Stone, a new solo album, on September 30^th and has already given us two singles from the album. The first, “This Life" (Bandcamp), hits you right away with it’s wonderful vocal and sparkling melody. For me, along with some others who know more about it, the tone of his singing and the sound of the song remind us of the late great Grant McLennan especially his solo work. And I can give Greg no higher compliment than that.

The Pure Pop Phive

Greg answers the PPP to make sure the cool kids know all about him.

How would you describe your music?

Rock/pop, heavy on guitars and melody.

What/who are your major influences?

My favourite music has great rhythm guitar, acoustic or electric, and great songs, songs, songs: Tom Petty, Beck, Radiohead, The Pretenders (80-81), The Beatles, Bob Dylan.

Do you perform live? Do you have any upcoming gigs?

When I saw Beck solo in early 2023, he said it was his first gig since the pandemic.
That made me feel better about not playing lately while I've been finishing the album.
My new gig idea is to play in record stores because that's where the people who like music go.

How do you support yourself so you can continue to make music?

What I make from music might buy me a coffee some days. In my other life, I've been a journalist, a website designer, and worked in corporate IT. That bought me a bit of a buffer, so now I have a house with a studio where I can work on music full time.

What’s an album you can’t live without (that's not one of yours)?

Only one. Jeez. They'd probably be all Bob Dylan albums anyway. This one especially because it blew my mind, aged 15: Bob Dylan, Blood On The Tracks