The Favorites, Bright Nights, Bright Lights

I’ll admit that when it started, I was nervous. The bumping bass, the half-whispered (or half-muttered, maybe) vocals, the retro-sounding synths; it all made me wonder if Bright Nights, Bright Lights was headed straight into tepid, mid-’90s bland-rock territory. Then the killer, carved-into-my-brain hook came in, with its sing-song-y, smirking half-threat, and the band charged headlong into the chorus, guitars turned up loud, vocalist/guitarist Jeremy Botter’s voice impassioned, defiant, and knowing…and hey, it’s the best power-pop tune I’ve heard in like a year and a half (since The Jennifer Echo’s “Edna Avenue,” to be exact).

That first taste of The Favorites pretty much sums up the band, honestly. They do a lot of things that really shouldn’t work like they do, that should leave me cringing and shaking my head as I hit the “Stop” button before they get through a handful of songs. And yet…well, they manage to pull it off. They grab hold of every loud, exuberant pop-rock influence they can, from Cheap Trick and Big Star on through to Fountains of Wayne and Semisonic, and end up with an album packed with hyper-earnest, quirky power-pop tunes that marry cranked guitars with beautiful vocal harmonies and some Rentals-esque synths.

The songs are clever in that way the best power-pop always seems to be — see the brazen backflip of a love-gone-wrong-song, “Let Me Come Home,” where the protagonist confidently asserts that the ex who’s kicked him out (and changed the locks) needs him to get her life back in order, or “Hope In The Sky,” which is a sneakily heartfelt story of two people finding one another out of the blue at an airport. It helps, by the by, that the songs happen to be brain-meltingly catchy, to boot, to the point where I’ve found myself searching the iPod randomly to find a track or two.

Even the missteps don’t feel like a big deal, somehow, after a few listens. Sure, the lyrics in pre-emptive love-declaration song “In Case You’re Wondering” and the gentle, heartbreakingly sweet “Golden Like The Fall” get a bit repetitive at points, and yes, the whole premise of “The Great Outdoors” is like a Chevy Chase movie that never really needs to be made, and the quasi-funkiness of rambling cautionary tale “La Tortuga Terrible” sounds misplaced, but in the hands of The Favorites, those little bits of imperfection come off as endearing and human rather than genuine mistakes.

And they’re easily forgivable considering that Botter and his bandmates can come up with such hellishly catchy-in-spite-of-themselves pop songs. Seriously; anybody who can write a track like “Something That You’re Missing” gets more than a little leeway from me.