V2. / Bmg
2005
The Alternative To Love
About This Album
Each decade has a handful of power pop icons to call its own, each working from the template that the Beatles and the Who constructed in the '60s, adhering to that melodic, guitar-driven sound but subtly updating it to fit the musical and emotional aesthetic of the time. In the '90s, the tradition was kept alive by Teenage Fanclub and Matthew Sweet, who married Big Star and Badfinger to '80s college rock -- there was also Jellyfish, who acted as if the '80s never existed -- and in the 2000s, it's been the New Pornographers, an indie-centric act who fills the Fanclub's spot, and Detroit-based singer/songwriter Brendan Benson, who is this decade's Matthew Sweet. Not that the Sweet-Benson analogy is 100 percent accurate. For one thing, Benson doesn't favor the messy guitars and confessionals that marked Sweet's '90s masterworks Girlfriend, Altered Beast, and 100% Fun, preferring tightly constructed songs and precisely detailed arrangements that emphasize his sweet melodies. Also, where Sweet's music tied neatly into the zeitgeist of the Alternative Nation of the early '90s, Benson's music is deliberately classicist and proudly out of time, belonging neither to the sounds nor the fashion of the 2000s.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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