Fast, new school punk rock with a melodic, oftentimes "emo" edge to the vocals, this Georgia band's sophomore effort is rife with really good songs that maintained my interest throughout the album. Rather than scream snottily over the double time beat, lead singer Andy M. chooses to actually sing and give a clear vocal delivery that benefits the band and sets it apart from a lot of other new school punk acts. To my ears, they conjure up comparisons to Lifetime or Lagwagon, but they manage to put their own spin on that particular formula. Lyrically, Whippersnapper also shows a depth to rival that of Garret Klahn (which a lot of similar bands either lack, or replace with puerile humor), especially on songs like "Simple Words" and "Blinded." Good stuff. (MHo)
(Lobster Records -- P.O. Box 1473, Santa Barbara, CA. 93102; http://www.lobsterrecords.com/)

In the beginning, God created Power Pop. He then separated the Power Pop into two living, breathing entities, and named them the Beach Boys and the Beatles, whereupon the mighty Moses-bearded Brian Wilson drugged himself into oblivion, and left the Fabulous Foursome to lead the musical world into the Promised Land. The Beatles begat the Kinks, the Byrds, the Small Faces, the Who, the Monkees (for good or for ill), which begat Todd Rundgren and Big Star, which begat, er, nobody. At the time. But then the Power Pop mutated into several different forms, masqueraded as Glam, New Wave or Punk, taking different forms in Marc Bolan, the Jam, Elvis Costello, the Cars (who were actually as way cool as they first appeared to you when you were sucking on that Hi-C drink box), XTC, and then proper American Punk, meeting its finest formulation in Hüsker Dü, the greatest band of its time or any other epoch, and also the Lemonheads, the Pixies, and finally, like it or not, Nirvana ("Drain You," "Lithium," anyone?), at which point, Power Pop was quickly submerged by the tide of flannel and went underground again.
Well, guess what: it's now arisen in the form of Jonathan Anderson, a.k.a. Wolf Colonel, and it's pretty damn refreshing to meet it once more. Anderson writes taut pop songs with tart lyrics much in the mode of the pajama-clad junkie Mr. Dando, but don't let that put you off, because "Confetti" is still burned somewhere in your cerebral cortex for a reason, and that's because he was a damn good songwriter before all he shot up all that horse between his toes. Like all good power-poppers before him, Anderson's got a sense for who to rip off and when: "Mister Easter Aeroplane" pulls the riff to "Crimson and Clover" or "Go To The Mirror Boy" from Tommy inside out; "The Emperor in the Sky" features REM-like arpeggios arcing gently over a mid-period GBV-like vocal melody; "The Clam, the Owl" is Bossanova-era Pixies. Throughout, the satisfying sonics of the record most closely recall that dense loud-band-in-small-room sound so familiar to devotees of Northwestern punk-pop like the Young Fresh Fellows or the Fallouts; the dual-tracked vocals evoke Paul McCartney. "Dear Elliot" may be aimed at area colleague Mr. Smith the famous rock star, but the total text of the song reads like a telegrammatic refrigerator-note rant:

you lend me a mower, then it breaks
ran over a bottle, and a rollerskate
stung by a bumblebee out in the lawn
you can buy me two mowers
dear elliott

and throws in some "whoo-hoo-hoo"s at the end for good measure. Who cares about making sense when the song rocks hard and you can sing along? Vikings of Mint's crowning achievement, though, is the very first track, "A Medium Rootbeer," in which Anderson and his boys tear through a two-minute tale of misfired love and lust as if their lives depended on it, led by Anderson's Westerbergian blueballed wailing over all those beautiful "whoa-oh-oh"s. That thrill alone's worth the price of the disc. K's announced that J.A.'s got another disc in the can -- my only complaint: at 28 minutes, couldn't you've waited a little bit and stuck 'em both together? (MA)
(K Records -- P.O. Box 7154, Olympia, WA. 98507; http://www.kpunk.com/)