The Broken West, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

You can sneer and the stick the ambient-noise CDs in the car stereo all you want, but it’s a fact: done right, nothing beats a good power-pop song. And with I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, Silverlake/Echo Park popsters The Broken West hit the mark a ridiculous amount of the time. The music sucks in all the power-pop influences — The Kinks, Big Star, The Cars, Teenage Fanclub, The Byrds, Elvis Costello — along with a few surprises (the Velvets, The Magnetic Fields, The Stereo) and yet manages to emerge its own distinct creature. You’ve got the gorgeous melodies, the alternately hazy, shimmery, and jangly guitars, the richly textured organ, the Byrdsian group harmonies, the fuzzy-soft curtain of sound the surrounds it all, the whole nine yards.

The best part, though, is that unlike the somnolence of a lot of The Broken West’s contemporaries/idols (Teenage Fanclub, I love you, but…), this isn’t power-pop to listen to lying down. There’s an undeniable fire to this stuff; the band’s not content to just sit back and nod their heads serenely, but instead sound like they’d be happiest tearing up the stage at some tiny club in the sticks. Tracks like “Down in the Valley” and “On the Bubble” practically explode from the speakers with joyous abandon, the guitars sparkling and clanging, Byrds-style, the band grinning from ear to ear. Odds are, you will be, too, once they’re done doing their thing.