Brendan Benson - Alternative To Love

Stunning, simply one of the best pop records you will hear this year. The record`s intricate sonic imprint also stems from Chad Blake`s mixes. This is a headphone record among other things, from the Spectoresque bombast of "The Pledge" to the mind-bending harmony and call/responses of the title track. Other highlights include the amiably wobbly "Cold Hands Warm Heart," which is already a live favorite, and the album-ender "Between Us," which lays the raw emotion of a woman`s post break-up answering achine message over an almost-psychedelic anthem. THE ALTERNATIVE TO LOVE feels like the precisely calibrated offspring of its predecessors brighter than Lapalco, not quite as big a sugar-rush as Mississippi. Much like Jason Faulkner, with whom he`s worked in the past, Benson proves to be a self-generating, all-performing studio wizard. The guitar driven power pop of opening track "Spit It Out" recalls that of bands like Sloan and The Odds, as perhaps filtered through Nick Lowe. "Without doubt, one of the best discs of 2005..continues to proves he`s one of the most brilliant singer/songwriters around..the main reason for his brilliance is his uncanny knack for defying categorization..other top shelf tunes include the opener, "Spit It Out", practically exploding with melody, the strong angular, "I Feel", the pslightly psychedelic, Falkner-esque "Gold Into Straw" and "Between Us" which takes a "Suffragette City" opening and flip flops it with some tensely beautiful passages"-Amplifier. "Not unlike Matthew Sweet a decade earlier, Benson is on a one-man mission to create the ultimate power pop headphone album - and his third album he comes pretty damned close"-Alternative Press. Truly, a winner on all fronts....Grade: A. "4 1/2 stars...Each decade has a handful of power-pop icons to call their own, each working from the template that the Beatles and the Who constructed in the `60s, adhering to that melodic, guitar-driven sound but subtly updating it to fit the musical and emotional aesthetic of the time. In the `90s, the tradition was kept alive by Teenage Fanclub and Matthew Sweet, who married Big Star and Badfinger to `80s collegiate rock -- there was also Jellyfish, who acted as if the `80s never existed -- and in the 2000s, it`s been the New Pornographers, an indie-centric act who fills the Fanclub`s spot, and Detroit-based singer/songwriter Brendan Benson, who is this decade`s Matthew Sweet. Not that the Sweet-Benson analogy is 100% accurate. For one thing, Benson doesn`t favor the messy guitars and confessionals that marked Sweet`s `90s masterworks Girlfriend, Altered Beast and 100% Fun, preferring tightly constructed songs and precisely detailed arrangements that emphasize his sweet melodies. Also, where Sweet`s music tied neatly into the zeitgeist of the Alternative Nation of the early `90s, Benson`s music is deliberately classicist and proudly out of time, belonging neither to the sounds or fashion of the 2000s.. While there is nothing unexpected here -- the closest it comes is on the modernist touches in the mixes by Tchad Blake, which are very much in the style of Jon Brion but not nearly as arty -- Its very familiarity is its strength, both to those already enamored of Benson`s music or to those guitar-pop fans hearing him for the first time. The first listen of Alternative to Love is like experiencing an old favorite with fresh ears -- the feel is familiar, but the details are all new, from the hooks and harmonies to the subtle details in the production, like the theramin that flows throughout the opener "Spit it Out." Alternative to Love isn`t a bracing record, but rather a friendly, comfortable one, an album that`s immediately likeable and gets better with each spin, as all great power-pop albums do. And make no mistake, this is close to a great power-pop record, due to Benson`s strong writing and impeccable sense of craft, which are the primarily appeals for power-pop fanatics in the first place. Perhaps it doesn`t have the kinetic energy or sense of adventure that mark the genre`s true classics from No Dice til Girlfriend, but Alternative to Love also exists in an era that`s enamored with the past and doesn`t take many risks, and on those terms, it`s the perfect power-pop album for its decade."-AMG

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