Bye Bye Blackbirds / Houses And Homes

American Dust

The return of classic, progressive pop heralded by The Shins, Beulah, Ted Leo, and the Pernice Brothers has produced many followers. But too often today's young, literate power-pop groups simply meet the expectations of their genre without exceeding them. A great guitar-pop band needs to add something special to the canon; the line must be straddled where a song remains universal, while offering inspired innovations from within. The Bye Bye Blackbirds are a great guitar-pop band. On their debut full-length, the band creates a powerful testament to pop music's capacity for depth, beauty, and expressiveness.  Boasting multiple songwriters, each with his own style, the group draws easy comparisons to Big Star, Teenage Fanclub, and Buffalo Springfield. These true students of song-craft are as eager to cite the influence of consensus progressive-pop geniuses like Elvis Costello, The Go-Betweens, and Prefab Sprout as they are the more obscure ones, like recluse song architect Bill Fox, transcendent choirgirl Judee Sill, garage-pop masters The Reigning Sound, and criminally ignored Kiwi-rockers Sneaky Feelings.  The Bye Bye Blackbirds make good on these influences, delivering involved, developed songs built from interweaving guitar hooks and intricate vocal harmonies. The sharp, contemplative lyrics are opaque yet revealing; particular yet universal. The overall sound, graceful and lush, never descends into mawkish romanticism. This is the type of pop band that the great John Peel would have championed: a group that offers intelligent and dramatic songs whose charms reveal themselves fully on repeated listens.  These are record store employees with eclectic musical vocabularies; would-be music historians whose compulsive need to explore the foundations of a genre has translated into a talent to rival that of their heroes. The Bye Bye Blackbirds do for guitar pop what Yo La Tengo did for art-rock, Taj Mahal did for the blues, and Bela Bartok did for European folk music.

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