It would appear that all the power pop sophisticates (i.e. hipsters) have been putting their
eggs in one basket of late – this one. If you haven't actually heard
Pugwash you've at least likely to have heard
of them, a Dublin outfit who over the course of the last decade or so have gradually been acknowledged as the great white hope for the aforesaid genre. From what I'm able to surmise
Play This Intimately (As If Among Friends), is the first proper album by the quintet to see an official US release.
The burning question is fairly obvious - can they possibly live up to the hype? If anything else they're purloining inspiration from the best of the Anglo side of pond, stretching all the way back to the Beatles and Byrds, while seemingly taking hefty cues from the US mainland by way of Jason Falkner and Matthew Sweet. An enviable start by many anyone's standards, and it's a formula that pays out convincingly on "Kicking and Screaming," "You Could Cry," and the deftly crafted "Hung Myself Out to Dry," squarely indebted to Jeff Lynne and ELO. I'd be hasty in downplaying the merits of any of the above titles, but the persnickety side of me would be remiss if I failed to note that Pugwash strike me as a little too professional for their own good.
Play...Intimately is linear, impeccably considered and orchestrated to a lustrous chrome shine, that to the band's detriment is woefully short in the spontaneity department. My only other quibble regards the abundance of slowpoke ballads (for lack of a better word) that function like a four-minute snooze button on an alarm clock.
At the end of the day, maybe I'm not a true Pugwash believer, but given the band's
history predates
Play... by more than a decade, I'd recommend you also investigate their career recap compilation
A Rose in a Garden of Weeds. As for their current record,
Play is available directly from
Omnivore,
Amazon (at a particularly attractive price point I might add) and
iTunes.