Best power pop albums: nineteen records with perfect songs and terrible luck

Rhodes made this alone in his parents' garage in Hawthorne, California, playing every instrument himself, barely 20 years old. The McCartney comparisons were lazy and also unavoidable: "Fresh as a Daisy" has the same knack for making a fussy arrangement sound tossed off in an afternoon.

His Dunhill contract demanded a new album every six months. When he couldn't keep up, the label sued him for $250,000 and he effectively stopped making records. First album on the list, first career ended by paperwork.

Apple's other band, and for one album the best pop group in Britain. George Harrison produced part of Straight Up before Bangladesh pulled him away and Todd Rundgren finished the job. That's how "Day After Day" and "Baby Blue" ended up on the same record sounding like they blew in from different weather systems.

Then their manager Stan Polley emptied the accounts. Pete Ham, who wrote both of those songs, took his own life in April 1975, days short of his 28th birthday. The songs went on earning money the band never saw.

Two songwriters who didn't especially agree: Alex Chilton, a veteran at 21 thanks to the Box Tops, and Chris Bell, who wanted to run a British group out of Memphis. Ardent released it through Stax, whose distribution couldn't get the thing into shops, and it sold well under 10,000 copies.

Bell was gone before the year ended. Almost every jangling American guitar band since 1980 has been paying interest on this record.

Cleveland's Raspberries had already had the hits, and on their last album Eric Carmen wrote about the machinery instead: "Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)" is a song about desperately wanting a hit record, complete with a fake AM-radio mix dropped into the middle of it.

It reached No. 18 on the Hot 100 and turned out to be their goodbye. Carmen broke the band up the following year. The most self-aware album in the genre, and the one that most obviously deserved to be enormous.

Made without Bell and with much less to lose, and it's looser and better for both. Stax had just handed its distribution to Columbia, that arrangement fell apart, Columbia refused to ship the album, and something like 20,000 copies escaped.

"September Gurls" is the reason half the bands further down this list exist. Hardly anyone heard it until the reissues a decade later.

After leaving Big Star, Bell drifted between Memphis and Europe cutting songs no label wanted. One single crept out on Car Records in 1978. That December he died in a single-car crash, weeks short of 28.

Rykodisc gathered the rest into an album in 1992, and it turns out he'd spent those years making the saddest music the genre has. "You and Your Sister" is unbearable in the right way.

Twilley and Phil Seymour came out of Tulsa making rockabilly-haunted pop drowned in reverb, Sun Records heard through a Beatles filter. "I'm on Fire" hit No. 16 in August 1975 and looked like the start of something.

Then Shelter Records lost its distribution deal and spent roughly a year out of business, so the album didn't arrive until July 1976, with the moment gone. Nothing else here sounds like it. Some writer rediscovers it every few years and the cycle starts again.

A San Francisco band who reinvented themselves as a British Invasion group a decade late, recorded at Rockfield in Wales with Dave Edmunds producing, out on Sire in June 1976. The title track is one of the great singles of the seventies: 12-string chime and a chorus that keeps climbing past where it should stop.

Punk broke the same year and made them look like antiquarians. The songs won that argument eventually.

The one place on this list where power pop got genuinely huge, and even then Japan noticed years before America did. Heaven Tonight has "Surrender", which is the whole genre compressed into three and a half minutes: a kid, his parents, a KISS record on the turntable, an emotional debt nobody can settle.

Rick Nielsen wrote riffs like a hard rock guy and choruses like a Brill Building guy, and Rockford, Illinois never produced anything better.

Cut in under two weeks, released on June 11, 1979, and then "My Sharona" sat at No. 1 for six straight weeks. It should have opened the door for every band on this list.

Instead an art director in San Francisco named Hugh Brown started printing "Nuke the Knack" badges, the backlash turned into a national hobby, and the follow-up sank without trace. Plenty of records below were signed in the Knack's wake and dropped in its aftermath. The album is meaner and sharper than its reputation allows.

Three guys from Zion, Illinois recorded Black Vinyl Shoes in a living room in 1977 on borrowed gear, inventing indie rock before anyone had the word for it. Elektra signed them, put them in The Manor with Mike Stone producing, and Present Tense came out sounding enormous without losing the bedroom melancholy underneath.

"Tomorrow Night" belonged on every radio station in America. It got on almost none of them.

Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple, two North Carolina expats loose in New York, writing pop songs with all the corners left on. Albion put it out in Britain in January 1981 and no American label would touch it, so for years the only way to own one of the decade's best American albums was to buy it as an import.

Nervier and more angular than most of what surrounds it here. This is the hinge between Big Star and the college-rock bands who took over next.

Crenshaw got his start playing John Lennon in a touring company of Beatlemania, which sounds like a curse and functioned as a training course. His debut is a dozen songs of clean guitar and unfussy heartbreak, arranged with no wasted motion at all.

"Someday, Someway" stalled at No. 32 and remains his only Top 40 entry. Nothing here is trying to be clever, and that restraint is the achievement.

Glasgow's answer to Big Star, right down to the guitar tone, and the title is the band admitting they knew how it looked. SPIN named it album of the year for 1991 over Nevermind and Out of Time, a call the magazine spent years defending and which sounds more reasonable every time you play it.

"The Concept" opens with a shrug about a girl who doesn't take drugs and closes with two minutes of the prettiest guitar noise anyone made that decade.

Sweet came out of a divorce with a pile of songs and hired Robert Quine of the Voidoids and Richard Lloyd of Television to play lead on them. That's the trick of the record: sweet, symmetrical melodies with two punk-schooled guitarists tearing holes in the arrangements on their way through.

Tuesday Weld on the cover, real bitterness in the words, hooks in every corner. It sold slowly through 1992, entirely by word of mouth, which is the only way anything on this list ever sold.

Andy Sturmer and Roger Manning spent Charisma's money on choirs, harpsichords, and Beach Boys harmony stacked ten deep. Jason Falkner had already quit after Bellybutton over songwriting credits, so this is the sound of two people with a studio and no brakes.

It came out in February 1993, sold close to nothing, and the band was over within a year. The cult has grown every year since, and the record still sounds like it cost more than it made.

A Halifax band on Geffen at the precise moment Geffen wanted a second Nirvana. Sloan handed in a warm, harmony-drunk pop album instead, and the label left it to die.

Readers of the Canadian magazine Chart voted it the best Canadian album ever made in 1996, then voted it back to the top in 2005. "Coax Me" and "People of the Sky" are the whole argument for why.

Portland kids playing 1978 power pop at punk tempo with no irony anywhere in it, recorded cheap for Dirtnap and released in spring 2003. On July 20 that year, three of the four died when their van crashed on the drive home from a show in San Francisco.

It has stayed in print ever since. The record is genuinely joyous, which makes it harder to listen to rather than easier.

An Auckland four-piece with jazz-school training and a singer, Elizabeth Stokes, who writes the most quietly devastating lines in current guitar pop. The harmonies are arranged like somebody did the homework; the songs still move like four people in a small room with the door shut.

Carpark released it in September 2022. Proof the form isn't a museum: it just needs someone who can still land a chorus.