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Hop on, Pop:
As Drawn by Ethan, Age 2
As you can tell by these four gents name, Hop on Pop is probably gonna be some form of a cheery pop quartet. More of this pop n roll. This definitely is straight up pop music, catchy hooks, choruses the size of Alaska and plenty of bouncy rhythms; however, where it sounds like it should be cheery and frolic-ey, Todd Leiter-Weintraub throws in some thick power-chord rock and emotional lyrics bending a bit towards the dark side. In between these back-and-forth tracks, there is a bit of an alt-country vein pumping beneath the albums surface. This album has received several comparisons to Big Star, which I will agree with on most accounts. It has that good up-tempo pop element with pretty straight-forward, easy to understand lyrics. In some cases, Todd sings with a casual Ben Folds-style quirkiness dancing just above the keyboard. Carys Here is a moving trip into a fathers complete adoration and love of his newborn child with a jumpy, swinging rhythm and great heartfelt words. Todd puts you right inside his head and shows you everything that hes seeing; a quality that I wish he extended to a few more of his songs. He has a wonderful talent for storytelling, but he loses it in a couple of spots. The music throughout this album is very piano and guitar heavy for the most part. The choruses have huge buildups into distortion and volume increases and then quickly fall off at the end back into lighter swooning verses. All the tracks roll along seamlessly and keep the listener right up alongside the drive, clutching closely to each chord change and struck note. The pieces that are a bit more ballad-like are great. He has an alt-country singer/songwriter side that he works with very well. I Do and the hidden track are moving, twangy traditional sounding country-blues pieces that stay in the back of your head. Production and presentation might be the biggest disagreements I could throw at this album. The album is a little less cohesive between certain tracks. Hop on Pop works the full spectrum from acoustic ballads to bounce-beat pop to some pretty solid rockers. It feels like two EPs were mixed around to form one larger album, ending up more like a compilation than a full length album. If the slower ballad-like tracks were combined with the rockers on one album in the lo-fi splendor that they are, it would sound great. Then, if those great poppy tracks were cleaned up a bit to bring out a little more from each instrument and put on a separate disc, they would flow from track to track beautifully. Conclusion: great songwriting and pop mentality. Some very strong tracks.
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