‘She’s Got The Power!..’ is the latest in an excellent series from Ace Records’ sister label, Big Beat, reappraising and recalibrating the sort-of-genre of power pop, and their second such release focusing exclusively on female-artists/women-led bands, following 2020’s Girls Go Power Pop. At its best, which is virtually all of the way through, from immortal classics to relatively obscure bangers, this compilation is irresistible. Unfurling its flag on the most solid of grounds, it begins with a 1978 Blondie cover of a Nerves song, ranges across three decades with hardly a misstep or drop in quality throughout, and ends on a high with a reunion-era track from the Go-Go’s, the only band also featured on the previous volume.
Old favourites like the Donnas, the Delmonas and Shonen Knife are here, sharing this compilation with groups I’ve been meaning to check out (the Courettes, Baby Shakes), bands I was shamefully unaware of (Bad Moves, the Launderettes, the Sugar Stems) and long-established solo artists whose careers I’m only now discovering (Palmyra Delran,Vibeke Saugestad, Lydia Loveless). This collection is educational in other ways too: I had no idea I liked Girlschool (their debut single ‘Take It All Away’ fixes that), that Sahara Hotnights are still active (reformed for an album last year), or that power pop is so protean, perennial, poignant.
Conceived as a fusion of the melody and emotion of pop with the energy and drive of rock, power pop – compared to, say, post-punk – doesn’t seem such a widely-used descriptor. But maybe I haven’t been paying the right kind of attention. It occurs to me that the proof of it is in the listening, that power pop’s not a genre to be philosophised or grappled over – just a lot of fun, and all the better for it. Not one song here aims to deconstruct rock or destabilise the government, for instance. But no lack of sonic substance is implied: if somewhere there’s an entire school of music theory devoted to the precise, scientific application of minor chord to verse or chorus then its research sample is right here, The Dahlmans and Suzy & Los Quattro being just two cases in point.
I read some reissues of 70s fanzine BOMP! a few years ago, in which pages the early gatekeepers of the scene disputed passionately over what was and wasn’t worthy of the power pop label. This album’s subtitle ‘Power Pop, Punk and Garage’ hedges bets a little and you can hear in these tracks a history of digressions and evolutions from the original Sixties-influenced sound, incorporating punk, garage revival, indie and alternative rock along the way, so that what results is perhaps less of a subgenre and more of a sensibility. The selections here from Sun 60 and Puffy AmiYumi sit in peak MTV smash-hit territory – I can picture Beavis and Butthead slagging off the promo videos – while Ivy‘s ‘Get Enough’ is so strikingly indiepop it could be a forgotten Velocette single, but there’s a steely glam rock influence percolating throughout much of this collection too, a bite beneath the friendly bark.
Tying these tracks together more than anything is a more-ish alloy of joy and nostalgia. Not just in the overt tributes to Joey Ramone and Brian Jones, but the wistful paeans to love, loss and licentiousness. And if alternative rock is tender-trapped in a permanent polylogue with music originally made between 1965 and 1980, well, there are worse ways to while away your time than to tune into this here conversation. Maybe you should.. welcome the new pop vision.
‘She’s Got The Power! Female Power Pop, Punk & Garage’ is out now on Big Beat.
