#115
1984 Housekeeping
Shoes
Silhouette
3.5 out of 5
Highlights:
Will You Spin for Me?
It’s Only You
By 1984 Power Pop, that weirdly titled genre (It’s not really pop, and it’s not very powerful but it’s not “soft rock”, which is really what it is) was moribund.
The last big hitmaker with that sound was probably Rick Springfield. The Knack had their backlash. The Records, 20/20, Cheap Trick,The Rubinoos, The Romantics, Dwight Twilley, Greg Kihn…some of them were making waves but, as in the case of Trick, it was hit and miss and mainly with power ballads. They weren’t selling out the record bins.
It’s a shame. It’s such a delicious genre. If its done well, it’s so rewarding. Case in point: Raspberries. And I maintain that Peter Buck MUST have listened to The Records “Starry Eyes” over and over before he nicked the sound.
This Shoes album (and I am not an expert on this band) is a solid entry into the category. In fact, it draws a nice line from Power Pop back to garage rock. “It’s Only You”, with it’s Herky-Jerky ska rhythm guitar owes more to the garage bands of the 60s than to The Police. It does rely a little heavily on synths in some places (“Oh, Angeline”, “Bound to Fade”) but never so much that they turn completely into synth-pop. It’s more like they wanna be The Cars for a song or two.
This is a pretty ok example of the genre in decline. Not the music. That’s really nice. Instead of going in to that dark music night, Shoes built their own studio, started their own label and continued to make music into the aughts.
The good news is 15 years later the Los Angeles Indie landscape would be littered with acolytes. SparkleJets UK, The Andersons, Chewy Marble, and a ton of others that it was my pleasure to play alongside.
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