Perhaps John Jurgensen is just trying to get a jump on the inevitable 70 birthday-related retrospectives and analysis that will accompany Bob Dylan’s next birthday in May. How else to explain his attempted takedown of Dylan in Friday’s Wall Street Journal. The piece, “When to Leave the Stage,” supposes that Dylan is too old, his voice too far gone, to justify continued performing.

“For people of influence in any walk of life, from corporate leaders to sports stars, the question of when to leave the stage is a crucial one. Do you go out at the top of your game, giving up any shot at further glory? Or do you dig in until the end, at the risk of tarnishing a distinguished career?” he writes. It’s a valid question, and one certainly worth discussing when it comes to Dylan. But his answer is flawed.

Rebuttals to his piece are several, but I’ll focus on one here: the notion that Dylan might somehow tarnish his legacy with subpar shows well past his prime. Jurgensen himself answers the question before it is asked, writing, “After 50 years in music, his place in the pantheon is unassailable.” Yet, he goes on write, “Firing the debate is his status as the ultimate music icon, the caretaker of a body of work that, many would agree, stands in contrast to his current sound,” going on to wonder, “if he plows on indefinitely, could the accumulating career lows undermine the highs?”

Anyone who asks such questions doesn’t understand Dylan or his music, for the artist is perhaps the greatest example of one whose art is never finished. Recordings capture moments in time. And these are truly moments. Any listen to the outtakes from a session reveals that Dylan attempts songs several different ways before deciding on one to release. Listen to the versions of “Mississippi” on the late period odds and sods collection Tell Tale Signs. All are different, all are wonderful. There may be one “official” version of a song, but only in the marketplace; not in Dylan’s mind.

As Greil Marcus wrote in a review of the Japanese-only release, Live 1961-2000 – Thirty-Nine Years of Great Concert Performances, “Then comes ‘Born in Time,’ and you figure it’s time to hit the restroom. There’s a long line, though, and you lose out on ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe.’ It will never be sung and played quite like it is this night in 1975. You missed it. Or would have, if this record didn’t exist.” (Taken from Marcus’ exhaustive, fascinating new book, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010.)

A live Dylan performance today offers a similar opportunity. He’ll never play the same song the same way again. You may not like this version of that song (or any song, as Jurgensen’s reports of mass walk-outs are to be believed), but someone else might. One fan laments these changes, telling Jurgensen, “What you’re used to feeling from his music just isn’t there.” Another, however, follows one disappointment-fueled show with another, declaring, “Compared to last time? 180 degrees!”

The newish book Advanced Genius Theory by Jason Hartley offers some related food for thought. The book posits that advanced artists — those like Dylan, Lou Reed and Neil Young — who have alienated fans along the way by seemingly betraying what they initially stood for, are actually too far ahead of the rest of us to be understood. The theory is more complex (and convoluted and, ultimately, indefensible) than that, but it sparks interesting debate. In writing about Dylan, Hartley rightly argues that “(Their fans) look to artist to make the sacrifices that they are afraid to make themselves. In Dylan’s case he was expected to be loyal to a style of music so a bunch of white college kids could feel as if they were making a difference.”

Forty years later, that is still happening, to a degree, as people look to Dylan to help them recapture something to which his music contributed. But Dylan has moved on, even as these people seek to remain in place. “Don’t Look Back” wasn’t just a catchy lyric, it was clearly a defining statement of purpose.

Yes, it’s understandable that someone could be disappointed by Dylan’s voice — Jurgensen cleverly calls it “a scatting Cookie Monster,” while I referred to it as a “compromised croak” in a review of an October 2007 show. But there were transcendent moments in the show I saw, and, I’m sure in every show Dylan has performed since. To suggest that he should hang it up is to suggest that fans willing to pay their money down for a ticket should be denied the chance of witnessing their own transcendence. Had Dylan listened to the calls from detractors in the mid-1980s, we wouldn’t have Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind or “Love and Theft,” and if he heeds this new batch of naysaying, who knows what we’ll miss?

When I logged into eMusic today, I wasn’t struck by the absence of Merge, Beggar’s Group (which includes Matador) and Domino Records, nor did I notice whether any of the announced 250,000 new songs were anything I cared to hear. What I noticed was that in place of the number of credits I had left, it now had a dollar figure: $12. Through all of the debate about eMusic’s change in direction, the presence of one dollar sign is what really signals the biggest change, and will be one thing that probably makes me leave.

Now, I know that my credits equate to money, that 1 song credit, if I did the math, equaled a specific dollar amount. But because my monthly fee came directly out of my checking account, and the eMusic site didn’t ever mention money unless you were on your account details page, it felt as if I was being magically  granted credits with which to sample new music. That may be a simplistic view, but it’s what allowed me to take chances. If I had 10 credits left toward the end of the month, I’d try a new band. But now, if I see I have $5 left, that starts to feel like a transaction, not an artistic indulgence, and I’ll be a bit more wise with my money.

And the thing is, at the same time eMusic has forced me to change the way I think about its service, it has changed that service. Yes, as eMusic CEO Adam Klein wrote on the service’s 17 Dots blog, “Over the course of the last year, we have been proud to throw our full editorial weight behind each new release on Merge, Beggars and Domino – spotlighting their breaking artists, conducting extensive interviews with longtime favorites, and giving these editorial pieces top billing on our homepage,” but that can’t help but lessen now that the service has 250,000 Universal Music Group songs to add to its already growing number of Sony and Warners titles.

You can argue that eMusic doesn’t know it’s audience, and you would have a lot of ammunition to support that view. Among the  service’s top five best sellers right now are the Tallest Man on Earth, Sufjan Stevens and Matt & Kim. In fact, only two of the two 15 albums are on major labels — Keisha and the Kings of Leon, both on RCA — while everything else is on an indie. Perhaps the Universal infusion will tip the scales, but after months with Warners and Sony acts in their catalog, eMusic doesn’t seem to be selling a lot of big label music.

Maybe eMusic is being savvy, by competing directly with iTunes and other mainstream services, offering the same thing for less money. But they’ll never be as comprehensive, nor is their service easier to navigate. And once people like me, who no longer see the value of the service, leave, they’ll need to raise prices to compensate. That competitive advantage will evaporate. They’ve gone from being the “corner music store” they originally touted to being Walmart: the same crap you can buy everywhere else, but at slightly lower prices.

I’ve said it before and likely will again, but now is a great time to be a reader and writer of crime fiction. Seemingly every day a new short story appears somewhere online, and the sheer wealth of stories available means never being at a loss for something to read.

Taking nothing away from those web sites (or their tireless editors), sometimes you still want the traditional experience of reading words on paper. In the last year or so, new publications have emerged to scratch that itch. Needle, debuting earlier this year with a journal format, offers nothing but short fiction. Crime Factory, which began as an online, PDF or Kindle publication, launched a print-on-demand version with its most recent, fifth issue. It offers short fiction as well as an impressive array of non-fiction that often puts the fiction in a larger context thanks to some insightful analysis from the contributing writers.

With that big leap forward for Crime Factory, as well as word that the next issue will be the special stand-alone Kung-Fu Factory, I thought it was time to check in with Cameron Ashley, one of the editors, to find out what’s going on over there. Cam was gracious enough to pound this out seemingly minutes after touching down after a trip Stateside for NoirCon and other stops.

TIRBD: Now that you have five issues under your collective belt, how has Crimefactory evolved when compared with your initial intentions?

CA: Hmm. It pretty much is exactly what we intended. My internal editorial filter is to try and do what Dave Honeybone would like and what Dave Honeybone would have wanted to do if he had the freedom we do now. I guess the rapid growth has been the main unexpected thing and that has led us to go, “Fucking hell. People actually read it; we’d better do it properly.” Took us quite a time to find our feet and staying on top of fiction subs is a problem, but generally people have been pretty patient. And they really have to be, I’m sorry to say. We only have so much space per issue for fiction. Hopefully the content their stories eventually rubs shoulders with eases the pain of the lateness… um, so yeah, our intention was always to try and do what we thought was cool (fiction or non) in a lo-fi way that we can say is punk, but is actually there because we have no idea what we are doing. That was basically our philosophy: the sheen of great content hiding design and editorial ineptitude.

How much more work has it been than you anticipated?

Oh, I knew it was going to be a lot of work. Dave Honeybone told me, “It will take over your life.” It hasn’t got that bad yet, but yeah, the three of us work pretty hard and my own writing has suffered slightly as a result, but that’s cool, I just need to work harder. Honestly though, the people we surround ourselves with make the process pretty easy. Our “staffers” are awesome and guys like my mate Jimmy Callaway are always there to lend a hand. Having just come back from both Bouchercon and Noircon, I can assure you that the crime writing community is filled with some of the nicest, most helpful, ego-free people I have literally ever met. If we need help, all we need to do is ask. I am blown away by how cool everybody is. Getting back to the question, Liam basically taught himself In Design as we were working on the first issue, but I’m sure even he would say that the workload is not quite as bad as you may think. We love doing it too, which helps.

A lot of crime fiction magazines and web sites have come and gone over the years. Did you take any lessons from those? Why has your lasted and thrived where some others have not?
Well, it’s only been a year since the relaunch, so it would be a bit unfair of me to compare. As far as “lessons,” well not many! I suppose our initial PDF format came about due to my friends bitching at me that they hated reading my stories online as it strained their delicate eyes. My dear friend Marcia would actually try and copy and paste my stuff and print it out at work. That seemed to me to be a cool idea, straddling the bridge between e-zine and print and maintaining some kind of link to volume 1 of CF, which was exclusively print. If you could call it “thriving,” I guess it’s because Keith, Liam and I are enthusiastic bastards and we try and surround oursleves with other people of equal enthusiasm in the hopes that we will form some kind of perpetual motion idea machine. So far, so good. Also, we try to remove the possibility of boredom by enjoying the freedom of the format and by getting drunk and coming up with whacky shit like KUNG-FU FACTORY, which has turned out to be perhaps the most anticipated project we’ve done so far.

How does an issue come together? Is that process easier now that you have a track record, or is what must surely be a flood of submissions making it more difficult (it ultimately more rewarding)?

It really varies issue by issue. We occasionally bump things up or down either because we need to or because a piece is a better fit elsewhere. Fiction-wise it’s now pretty easy as we have a backlog of stories waiting and we can mix and match them to create (hopefully) a pretty diverse and interesting batch of stories each issue. Non-fiction has been a bit of a headache. It’s actually pretty mind-boggling the lack of good non-fiction we get. It’s actually weird. Nobody seems to want to write it. It’s something I’m unwilling to budge on either – I am not ruling out all-fiction issues occasionally – but CF was founded as a magazine. If you don’t want to read the articles and interviews and you want to write fiction, you’re doing yourself a disservice and I really do think a lot of story writers just want to see their name in print and don’t give a fuck about anything else, which demonstrates a lack of true authenticity in my book. Getting back onto the topic, Nerd of Noir is rock-solid and turns his shit in way ahead of deadlines, and the addition of Melbourne’s own Andrew Nette has been an utter blessing. These guys get it. And the non-fiction we’ve thus far run (and have coming up) I’m really happy with, so I should just stop whining.

You offered a printed version of the magazine as an option for the first time with this issue. Is that a change in philosophy, or did the stars finally align?

No philosophy change at all. We just realised that it was pretty easy to do (apart from the re-formatting headaches), so why not do it? We want to be able to pay contributors one day, so it’s also another revenue stream and, having seen Steve Weddle’s copy recently, it looks pretty cool. Further formatting tweaks await us, but basically it’s just a natural progression. My hope was always that people would print PDF issues off and read them at home (Adrian McKinty reads his in the bath which is perfect) and this is taking that to another level. Plus, people kept asking us and we saw that Steve and the NEEDLE crew were doing it, and rocking it, so why not? However you want to read it, we will try to accommodate you.

What will the future hold for Crimefactory?

Basically to continue to do the best job we can and put out as much cool, interesting stuff as possible and catch more mistakes. KUNG-FU FACTORY is coming up – which has exceeded my pretty high hopes for content – and CF #6 has some dynamite content lined up, so the immediate future looks pretty good. Plus, we have a new cover artist as of next issue which I’m really excited about (more on this later), so the mag will look better than ever, or perhaps just good depending on your point of view. The CF anthology from New Pulp Press is also on the horizon. We need to line-edit and then we’re good to go. It’s a crazy, crazy line-up and will be a helluva read. More themed issues like KFF if time permits and the implementation of a really cool true crime feature featuring rotating writers. I’m really excited about that as I fucking hate most true crime as it’s just exploitative trash, and I’ve wrestled with the possibilities of including it somehow in CF. The way we’re going to do it is perfect for us and some people I’ve worded up to write for it are just as excited.

While my bank account doesn’t always agree, I must say it is a great thing to have someone at the local book store who knows my tastes. You walk in, converse for a moment as you are led around the store, and leave with your wallet lighter and your bookshelves bowed.

My last trip to Prairie Lights in Iowa City found Paul excited about several books, including Ghosted, the debut novel from Canadian journalist Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall. He pulled the book from crime and mystery section (always a good sign) and told me as he pressed it into my hands that he thought I’d like it.

I had (as always) a formidable reading stack, but time was of the essence. If I enjoyed the book as much as Paul expected, I had agreed to host Bishop-Stall’s reading two weeks hence. So, I added it to the stack of books I started that night. While I made good headway into all four, Ghosted is the one that I reached for most often, and the one I finished first. The first 70 pages sucked me in, and despite twists and turns that took it in several unexpected directions, I found it difficult to put down.

The book tells of Mason Dubisee, a 30-year-old drug-addled drifter who may list “writer” on his tax forms, but who hasn’t written anything more than cryptic notes for an eternally gestating novel in quite some time. He is starting pretty close to the bottom, but in the grand tradition of noir protagonists, there is nowhere for Mason to go but down. It is while working as a vendor at a “Godfather”-inspired hotdog stand that he hits upon a job that will help deliver him to the bottom: ghostwriter for suicide notes.

Along the way he meets a handful of people looking to end their lives, people who, in truth, are in a better place than Mason. Dealing with people in such dire straits has the expected effect, dragging Mason into untenable situations driven by drugs, drink, gambling and the breaking of a few laws.

About halfway through, the book takes a darker turn in to thriller territory, as Mason comes face-to-face with pure evil at the same time he finally finds something he doesn’t want to lose: the love of a good – though paralyzed and drug-addicted – woman.

All of this would be unbearable were it not for Bishop-Stall’s ability to leaven the darkness with sharp wit and gonzo action. The author knows from grit – his previous book, Down to This, chronicles a year living in Toronto’s Tent City – but he uses it just as often in the service of wackiness as he does chronicling despair.

Bishop-Stall is on tour in support of Ghosted right now, and any fans of crime fiction or noir would be doing themselves a service by checking him out. He just lost his U.S. publisher (Soft Skull put the book out here this fall), so he can use a little help getting the word out about this fascinating book.

Nov. 11, 7 p.m. at The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago.

Nov. 15, 7 p.m.  at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City

Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m. at The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St., San Francisco

Nov. 22, 7:30 p.m. at Powell’s Books, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, Ore.

TIRBD: Did the idea for Ghosted evolve out of the work you did for Down to This?

SBS: I would say, not so much. There are some similar themes of addiction and desperation. And there was one suicide in Tent City that affected me a fair bit, but that year was not consciously present in my mind as I was writing Ghosted. The only section that is very much informed by my time in Tent City is the passage on page 272 about “the war being with them.”

What was the first element to the story when you conceived it, and did that lead you in the direction the book eventually took?

All I had at the start was the premise: a man who ghostwrites suicide letters for other people. By necessity I knew it would have to be dark and hopefully darkly humorous, but I had no elements of character or narrative, at the outset.

In some ways this feels like two books, with a lighter tone at the beginning and a much darker one in the latter half. Was that a conscious shift, or just something dictated by the story’s progression?

It was not so much a conscious shift, more one dictated by the story arc, which I then embraced wholly. To me it is the movement of most things in life, from absurd to scary. And I also know they’re the two hardest things to do as a writer: to be genuinely funny and genuinely scary, so I tried to be one, and then the other, and hopefully sometimes a bit of both.

There is an interesting bit of relativism at work in the story, with the people Mason helps often seeming more with it than he is. Was that a commentary, intentional or otherwise, on our self-help, self-medicated culture?

I dunno, but it sounds good when you say it.

How did you bring your work as a journalist to this project? Was it difficult to write fiction where you had written non-fiction for so long?

Most of my journalism has been intensely immersive, experiential, whatever you want to call it. And in some ways I was experiencing some of what Mason experiences in the story – we have similarities, he and I, so there is that parallel. But really, writing non-fiction is a much different animal for me. It is much easier, because there are fewer choices to make. With writing fiction, I find it is very easy to become paralyzed by the overwhelming abundance of possibility – the fact that anything can happen at any moment. You are constantly having to limit yourself, which is something I’m not very good at.

Writing is a big part of the story, obviously. Did Mason’s notes about the book he was writing evolve out of your own about this book? Did Mason’s troubles mirror your own?

I guess so. In general, Mason is born out of my greatest faults, inabilities. My great hope is that I deal with my problems, both in writing and in life, better than he does.

So, I just finished Chris F. Holm’s ebook Eight Pounds: . To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect.  I had seen Holm’s stories in some of the same places I have published (Thuglit) and those I aspire to (Needle, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine), so his name was familiar. For 99 cents, however, I figured it was worth taking a flyer and gave it a try.

Having just finished the last story today, I can say I’m glad I did. Eight Pounds contains eight solid stories, most of which wouldn’t feel out of place in an anthology from a major publishing house. Their quality is among many reasons why I have been recalibrating my internal gauges and measures when it comes to finding good things to read. I, like most others, have been trained to expect that things offered for free are somehow less valuable than things we pay for. But I have increasingly found that, while there is obviously a lot of supbar writing out there on the Internet, there is also a lot of top-notch work to be found.

Holm has been offering a good chunk of the good stuff over the past few years, if this collection is any indication, and it feels like he’s on the cusp of something bigger… and more lucrative.  I know he priced this at 99 cents to get the word out, but reading this provided more entertainment than the last movie I saw, and you can’t see one of those without a transaction involving large bills taking place. But no matter how and where he ends up publishing his next work, I’ll be paying attention. As I get serious about my own writing, being in publications and on sites with folks like Holm is a big boost. But reading Eight Pounds, I also know I have some work to do.

So, last October, I saw a link to a note from writer Robert Swartwood where he solicited submissions for an anthology of what he called “hint fiction:” a story of 25 words or less. I had never heard of Swartwood, had no idea what was to become of the accepted piece or when they might appear. I wrote up a couple and sent them off:

DOUBLE DOWN

Susie looked at Randy in the mirror, ignoring the gun as she straightened her wig. “You’re right. I could pass for the senator’s wife.”

NEW SHOES

It took months, but the boy could walk again, and his first steps would be in whatever direction took him away from his mother’s boyfriend.

A few weeks later, I received Swartwood’s cordial reply, a rejection, I was sad to learn. “These are both well done but didn’t win me over in the end, I’m afraid.” He lessened the blow by reporting that there had been more than 2,400 submissions, with an acceptance rate of less than .03 percent.

I hadn’t thought about that until scanning Jacket Copy blog in the Los Angeles Times. There, I found a review of the book, Hint Fiction, edited by Robert Swartwood. This is the end result of the submission process. I’m no longer disappointed to have missed the cut. Or rather, I’m disappointed, but not surprised.  Stuart Dybek, Joyce Carol Oates, Ron Carlson, Benjamin Percy… the contributors list includes some heavy hitters.

The notion of hint fiction is interesting. There is the six-word story that has become popular on the web (Chris F. Holm’s recent contest being one of the more recent, fruitful endeavors), and flash fiction of course is prevalent as well (Discount Noir from Patricia Abbott and Steve Weddle is currently offering some great writing in that vein). This falls in between, and based on the samples in the LA Times piece and those of Swartwood himself, it yields some interesting work.

There was a time in the late 1990s when there were few high-profile power pop releases of which I was unaware. I subscribed to all of the magazines (Amplifier!), got the Not Lame mail order catalogs (where everything was Extremely Highly Supremely Recommended!), attended the rare shows that made their way through Iowa City and picked up a lot of records.

I don’t remember growing bored of the genre, but rather felt as if it had run its course to a certain degree. Looking back, I assumed that the genre had done what every subculture does: the best and brightest moved on for fear of being pigeon-holed, and the true believers dug deeper underground to find the true fans willing to part with a buck.

So, I was surprised to see that, instead of stopping around the time when my interest waned, the genre continued to chug along. Case in point: Rainbow Quartz Records. For a brief time, that imprimatur was enough to get me to buy an album. It was the sign that the album under that logo contained meticulously executed catchy psych pop. I hadn’t knowingly seen a new Rainbow Quartz disc in a decade until a nice publicist with a healthy mailing budget dropped a few packages in the mail to me. Now, I sit with eight new Rainbow Quartz releases stacked on my desk, and in some ways it’s as if the past 10 years never happened, while in other ways the label and the sound it promotes has branched out a bit.

Rather than try to weave together some sort of magnum opus, I’ll offer a sentence or two about each release, in no particular order.

The Flower Machine – Lavender Lane: While the band isn’t mentioned on this CD’s one-sheet, I’d give my left arm if leader Peter Quinnell could prove he had never heard the Clientele. His breathy vocals are a dead ringer for Alasdair Maclean, while the 60s atmosphere permeates both bands’ music. The Flower Machine rocks out more here, and offers more variety, though I’ll still take the Clientele for sheet songwriting prowess. A good start, however.

The Parties – Coast Garde: These first two reviews aren’t meant to suggest that there is nothing original going on here, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Posies when spinning this. That’s a definite compliment. This is less overtly rock than the Posies, and more in keeping with the Rainbow Quartz retro aesthetic, but the vocals and strong hooks are certainly reminiscent of that better-known combo.

The Sails – A Headful of Stars: While the previous two bands seemed to ape other groups in some ways, The Sails ape specific songs of specific bands. To be more blunt, I could imagine leader Michael Gagliano having a successful career in a mid-period Beatles cover band. “I’m Only Bleeding,” the lead track, owes a huge debt to “Tomorrow Never Knows” (though not as large a one as Noel Gallagher owes). There are other elements here, giving this a heavier psych vibe. This is a talented guy making catchy music, even if it does feel familiar.

Solaram – Love & the Sweet Devine: Joe Tagg was in another band I had never heard of and now is in this band I had never heard of. Fans of truly retro-sounding psych pop will certainly hear about Tagg and Solaram soon, for unlike the rest of the albums here that use that retro sound as coloring on otherwise fairly modern sounding efforts, Tagg takes pains to keep things sounding like they were recorded in a 1960s garage. That gives his songs a nice gritty feel. The stylistic and dynamic variety here is also great to hear.

The June – Green Fields and Rain: This brings me to the first of the two foreign bands here. Foreign psych pop bands, if I can generalize, seem aggressively dedicated to authenticity. If they’re going to sound like the Beatles’ trippy era, then they’re going to really sound like that. Italy’s The June are going do what it takes. So, if they need a sitar so a George Harrison-sounding song really sounds like a George Harrison song, they’ll use on. The June are certainly competent, but this sounds a bit derivative for my tastes.

The Gurus – Closing Circles: This band is from Spain, and like a lot of European power pop acts, they have things down cold. They have fully absorbed the sounds of the bands in an era they love, and can regurgitate it capably. But like The June, there just doesn’t seem to be an original spark here. If you’re looking for loving recreation of the early 80s skinny tie sound, look them up. But if you’re looking for something with elements you might not have heard before, keep looking.

The High Dials – Anthems for Doomed Youth: I somehow have acquired most of the High Dials’ catalog over the years, and they’ve always seemed like a band with unfulfilled promise, a reach that exceeds its grasp. I’m not sure where Anthems for Doomed Youth fits on that continuum. It feels like a refinement that gets it closer to what it seems able to accomplish, but it’s still frustratingly not quite there. Such criticism is unproductive, as I have nothing to suggest save for the lame “I’ll know it when I hear it.” In the meantime it’s damn entertaining to hear them working to get there. This band has fully digested a wide range of influences and is moving toward a sound that is more fully its own, blending more folk-based elements into its mildly psychedelic sound.

Volebeats – Volebeats: This is the gem of the batch, another wonderful album of low-key folk pop from one of the best underappreciated the U.S. has to offer. Not only that, but it’s a double album, a consistent double album that does everything one expects from a Volebeats album. The sweet vocals, loping rhythms and slight country underpinnings that drive the band’s songs are here in force. Leaders Jeff Oakes and Matthew Smith have crafted another batch of top tunes that ought to raise their profile, but which don’t stand a chance of doing so given how out of step they are with mainstream anything… thank the god of your choice. Fans of the Vulgar Boatmen ought to eat this up (and vice versa). They even cover Kiss and the Kinks (and make the Kiss one more their own).

To wrap up, I liked each of these releases. Given my limited time, I probably won’t spin The June or the Gurus again, but everything else could pop up in the rotation. Forced to choose, I’d play the Volebeats, the High Dials, the Sails and the Parties, in that order. Suffice to say it’s nice to dip a toe back into the power pop world and find it still thriving.