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The Exploding Hearts

Shattered | Dirtnap
By ANDREW MARCUS  |  January 2, 2007
3.5 3.5 Stars
070106_INSIDE_SHATTER
At its best, power pop is the only guitar-heavy music that defies gravity. Even Cheap Trick’s suicide vignette “Candy” doesn’t quite lower the spirit. Portland, Oregon’s Exploding Hearts, a band who lost three of its members in an August ’03 van accident, come straight out of that school of power pop. On their debut, the aptly titled Guitar Romantic, the band revived the genre’s wistful crunch without the skinny-tie preciousness of ’80s new wave or paint-by-numbers predictability. Instead, they modeled themselves as earnest ’70s-era punk rockers. Shattered, a collection of outtakes, rarities, and alternate takes, offers more of wiry-voiced Alex Cox winking at romantic overstatement (since the girl left him, he’s been “eating out of spray-painted garbage cans and sleeping at the bar”) and guitarist Terry Six, the only original member who survived the accident in 2003, squeezing out classic Mick Jones leads. The disc’s bonus video, of a performance two nights prior to the fatal accident, is a raucous reminder of the sheer power of the Exploding Hearts’ bratty, soulful music.
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  Topics: CD Reviews , Entertainment, Music, Pop and Rock Music,  More more >
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ARTICLES BY ANDREW MARCUS
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  •   RIGHTEOUS JAMS  |  January 16, 2007
    There’s a reason the recent documentary American Hardcore cuts off around 1986.
  •   THE EXPLODING HEARTS  |  January 02, 2007
    At its best, power pop is the only guitar-heavy music that defies gravity.
  •   DARLING DOWNS  |  December 11, 2006
    Australia has always had a way of taking American genres and making them their own in a down-to-earth way, from the breeziness of singer-songwriter Paul Kelly to the power pop of the Hoodoo Gurus and You Am I to the garage rumblings of Lime Spiders and Jet.
  •   VARIOUS ARTISTS: STRANGE FOLK  |  May 08, 2006
    Given the hypnotic arrangements and talk of fairies, the 19 tracks compiled on Strange Folk might more accurately be termed “enchanted folk” or, more skeptically, “dippy folk.”
  •   FROM BELFAST TO BOSTON  |  January 17, 2006
    “You look at the Bosstones," says one veteran punk frontman, "you look at Dropkick Murphys, you look at the Bruisers, the Ducky Boys, and you hear SLF in all those bands."

 See all articles by: ANDREW MARCUS

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