folk-rock

Power pop is back. Again. I wish we tracked its rises and falls the way we do the successive named waves of emo (people tried, then lost count; the Wikipedia page gamely attempts a taxonomy and gives up), but instead I’ll just be pleased the albums keep arriving.

The last few years have been good ones: Sharp Pins, This Is Lorelei, Good Flying Birds. Co-produced by Teenage Fanclub’s Gerard Love in Edwyn Collins’ studio, Just A Day has its bona fides in order. This is the substrain that runs on chiming guitars, bubbling organ, transatlantic vocals and stacked harmonies. They’ve dropped the horns and pedal steel of earlier records and, lovely as those were, the stripped-back four-piece is the better sound.

It isn’t pure pre-millennial Glaswegiana, though. There are more ambitious moments here, and the band hasn’t shed its cosmic Americana entirely; I caught the Flying Burrito Brothers more than once. A summer record, then. Long live the genre.

Brown Horse are from Norwich, which you would never guess from Total Dive. The guitars are pure Crazy Horse and the pedal steel weeps on cue. A song called “Heart of the Country” arrives with no apparent irony. This is the modern Americana mould—the one Ovven, Ratboys, Florry, Tiberius and a dozen others are working right now, all of them tracing the same lines back through MJ Lenderman to Jason Molina, Lucinda Williams, Silver Jews, the Drive-By Truckers, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo.

The geography is the only misdirection. The other song titles (“Wreck”, “Sadness Reigns”, “Oblivion”) tell you exactly where the lyrics live, and they aren’t wrong.

The standout is “Twisters”. You could argue the record doesn’t move around much: the mood, the tempo, the instrumentation and the preoccupations hold fairly steady from start to finish. That’s a fair criticism of a less assured album. Here it isn’t one. When a band sounds this good doing one thing, the consistency reads as confidence rather than limitation, and I’m happy to sit in it for 45 minutes.