The Pop – Go!

This is a tremendous album from start to finish,I’ve had it from the day it got released,and it still sounds as fantastic as the first time I put it on my record player.Magical!!

Earle Mankey has more renown as an engineer for the Beach Boys and Elton John than as producer of the Paley Brothers and Concrete Blonde, yet his pop sensibilities should have told him not to change a thing with the Pop. Their debut on the indy Automatic Records was full of life and spirit. It isn't that Go is as much a bad album as it isn't anywhere near the sound or excitement of their debut, and, subsequently, it isn't as good. Clive Davis allegedly wanted to sign the Cars, and if you listen to "I Want to Touch You" you wonder if it is the Cars' "In Touch With Your World" or "Bye Bye Love" by way of the Romantics or the Fixx. "Go," the title track, has more of the slick side of the Clashthan their edge, which was the underground power pop that made the original Pop disc such a wonder. This is the clearest example of taking Cheerios and turning it into Fruit Loops; the difference between these two albums so vast that you'd never guess it's the same band if given a blindfold test. As light years away from the Beatles performing "My Bonnie" is to the brilliance of "I Am the Walrus," the only difference is that earlier the Pop material is the better material. Divorce this music from what came before it and lead-off track "Under the Microscope" is actually pretty good. So is "Shakeaway," while "Beat Temptation" sounds like A Flock of Seagulls three years before they'd hit. "She Really Means That Much to Me" could be Bryan Adams, and there's a good chance Adams work in Sweeney Todd was helpful in influencing this project. Side two also has its moments with Prescott/Swanson's "Waiting for the Night" sounding a bit like an Arista act from 1976, the Dwight Twilley Band, and that is certainly a good thing. Their three-minute "Falling for Carmen" is a song in conflict. It is pure power pop, but caught somewhere between the drive of the first LP and the souped up strategy of this disc's confinement. The drums are much too big here for what this group was all about. Lead guitarist Tim McGovern's "Maria" is five minutes of more quirky Cars clone sounds, imitation Roy Thomas Baker which interrupts these little pop gems. To those of us who consider rock & roll an art form, it is such a shame that what could have been gets disoriented in the translation. "Legal Tender Love" suffers that fate, as does most of Go, an album that didn't because it went out on too many limbs.