Labels: self released
Review by: Andy Malcolm
The other week whilst on holiday in “the Big Apple”, I spent an evening at a punk show in Brooklyn, and a fine evening it was too. It’s fun to find yourself a long way from home and to be able to just roll up at a gig and feel comfortable and made welcome, and then see a bunch of good bands that you know very little about put on a cracking gig. The band that I enjoyed most that evening was Pop Zeus, and sadly they had sold out of the tape version of this recording, so I had to settle for a download. The collection of 10 songs is decidedly enjoyable, although loses some of the punk edge that they had live, where the intro to pretty much every song made the hair on the back of my neck stand up on end. With that filtered out, you’re left with something that I sort of know is referred to as “power pop’, a genre I know little about and find to be a touch hit and miss. It means that my references for this are more along the lines of the Marked Men and Superchunk, rather than some band that wrote a scorching hit in 1979 and then disappeared only to be re-discovered on a comp many years later.
Generally if the band can pull off some buzzing riffs, strong vocals and smart song-writing, then it’s something I’ll appreciate, and Pop Zeus have all these aspects nailed for pretty much all of this album. Now and again things don’t quite click, but for the most part it’s difficult to be critical, and there are a whole bunch of memorable songs and riffs on this album that will burrow their way into your head. This is perfect music for speeding along with the car window down and the volume at full whack, unfortunately this is England and summer is fucked. I’ll make do with the office window shut, headphones on and the volume at moderate. And so it goes.