Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Crimpshrine and Fifteen songs often interpolate or play with the idea of reworking/reusing lines from earlier famous songs within the lyrical and musical framework of songs, Ott's and Jack Curran's melodies are deceptive because they bury them in layers of distortion. However, just as their lyrical ambition often tells complex stories through the framework of deceptively simple choruses, the lyrics hide Easter eggs within simple love and relationship songs. Crimpshrine's "Tomorrow" borrowed lyrics from "Tomorrow" from  Annie , but Ott has continued to include popular lyrics in interesting ways. Pop melodies were common in many of the bands that played with Fifteen at 924 Gilman Street in the 1990s, but Ott's hardscrabble songs stand out because of their wordplay and insistence on melodic invention.  Other bands that played with them reveled in wordplay and definitive walking East Bay basslines, but generally fitted into different frameworks. While th...

Green Day has maintained a low profile since they released three full albums of music, ¡Uno! , ¡Dos! and ¡Tré! , in 2012, and now return with a collection of demos from the same recording sessions. The aptly yet not originally named, Demolicious , clever portmanteau notwithstanding, is slight, yet infectious. Released on Record Store Day 2014 the collection purports to give fans what bassist Mike Dirnt wrote on his instagram account: how ¡Uno! , ¡Dos! and ¡Tré! would have sounded if we were still on Lookout Records!" The record is certainly more immediate than what the band has been doing in recent years. "99 Revolutions" kicks it off with a poppy burst of inspiration that is more stripped down than the version on ¡Tré!, but sounds more like it would fit nicely alongside Insomniac's "Stuart and the Ave." one of that album's more melodic songs. The intro of "Angel Blue" sounds like the Clash before Billie Joe Armstrong's vocals shif...

I've always had a fascination for lesser-known power pop bands and singles. Whether this means singing the praise of 20/20's second album, championing Brendan Benson's pre-Raconteurs efforts, or even calling Pansy Division's Absurd Pop Song Romance the greatest power pop album, I sometimes find myself reaching for that sugary, disposable pop single. Albeit, I generally grab one that won't make the radio or even get noticed in this age of increasing vocoder usage and auto-tuned pop atrocities. Case in point, these two songs by the pop punk band, Weston off of their 1996 album, Got Beat Up , are so dynamic, poppy, and well-written that they deserve space in the echelon of killer pop tunes. While the rest of the record is an excellent pop punk record with the type of sugary licks that Weezer wishes they used, these two songs stand out due to their maturity. No small feat on a record where most of the songs deal with immature love and the awkwardness of being young an...