Popping Off

Album: The Mighty Lemon Drops, World Without End, 1988

Best Track: "Inside Out"

Lasting Memory: When I started the project that constitutes the basic purpose for this blog -- listening to all of the cassettes and CDs I've collected since my early teens -- I was hoping I would make some great rediscoveries of bands I had all but forgotten about. To date, such rediscoveries have been rare but welcome, especially in the cases of Firehose and House of Freaks.

I am happy to now add The Mighty Lemon Drops to the list of bands whose music I unwisely relegated to the deepest depths of my tape rack, to be played again probably never by chance or choice. But World Without End has come up in the blog queue, and I am here to report that it is as charming a collection of power pop as was ever recorded and released.

The album opens with the one Mighty Lemon Drop's song that I can recall ever receiving any airplay in the United States, "Inside Out." It's a great song, to put a none-too-fine but completely accurate point on things. I don't know that my picking the song apart to explain why the song is great would be helpful in any way. I do know that whatever the separate and combined elements of that greatness are, they extend to all but probably one of the songs on World Without End.

I was particularly impressed anew with "Hear Me Call," "Fall Down (Like the Rain)," and "One by One." Enjoy at your leisure.

Up Next: The Mighty Lemon Drops, Out of Hand, 1987 (out of order, but what can you do?)