Written by: Dave Cantrell

Sometimes it’s just what you need, smart aggressive killer pop painted in great wide rocking strokes the underlying brushwork of which not only stands up to nuanced scrutiny but invites it with outstretched arms and an undeterrable confidence. In the case of Make Me Over, it’s as if the record, deep in its grooves, knows you need it and is only too eager to oblige. Such, anyway, is the impression gleaned from listening to the new release from Charleston four piece A Fragile Tomorrow.

Formed originally in New York’s Hudson Valley in 2003 by Sean and Dominic Kelly – twins afflicted with cerebral palsy as well as a wicked, go-for-the-jugular pop sense – and their brother Brendan (bassist Shaun Rhodes came on board in 2006), the band, through hard work and a singular drive, have built an ever-growing fan base around the world and among their peers, counting as admirers the Indigo Girls, a couple of Cowsills and members of the Bangles among many (many) others, not least the venerable Joan Baez. The Indigos and Baez, if fact, feature on Make Me Over‘s final track and that, you’ll have to agree, is no small credit to the lads’ inherent – and apparently magnetic – musical abilities.

On this, their fifth album, A Fragile Tomorrow again draws on the echoes of predecessor spirits the dB’s, Big Star, even the Raspberries, with touches of, I dunno, Dwight Twilley and Todd Rundgren at his hit-making craftiest peeking out here and there. It’s no surprise, as you hear track after track animated by a gleaming pound and the sharp naturalism of a band fearlessly – shamelessly even – chasing hooks wherever they find them, that the likes of Peter Holsapple and Mitch Easter dot their résumé.

Going, in the first three tracks, from the music biz treadmill lament of “Make Me Over (Noddy Holder)” with its Beach Boy harmonies abutting bright aggro (which, indeed, is a bit Slade-ish even if the Noddy nod isn’t exactly in the form of a tribute) to the teenage jangle fest of “Tie Me Up Again” to “Billion”‘s layered, sex-positive pop romp that sounds like a Crowded House of mirrors surrounded by walls of sound, it’s all a bit dizzying which is to say dazzling which is to say no wonder they’ve attracted the attention of certain members of the rock aristocracy. Lightly keening ballad “In My Mind” aside, there is, as often as not, a kind of careeningness to the tracks on this record, a wildly flailing precision (if that makes any sense, which I think it will when you hear it) even as the song structures themselves are as solid as, well, rock. And have no doubt, primary songwriter Sean Kelly displays impeccable instincts here, the songs flow with exactly that classicism and panache we so admire in those antecedents mentioned above.

“Kissing Games” sports a pop finery that’s not miles away from the pre-disco Bee Gees, that easy studio grandeur, “Tell Me How You Feel” floats a set of Eric Carmenized hooks to make its broken-hearted point with an aching grace, “Hit Parade” hits with the jubilant force of early Cheap Trick even as the words – perhaps a bit too broadly – lash out again at the glossy grind of being in a media-anointed band. “Can’t You Hear Me,” like most tracks on MMO, bristles with a bright complexity of elements in the service of that finest of specimens, the head-knocking pop-rock bauble whose power derives from the dark doubt of its lyric. Most intriguing is “Siouxsie,” a fanboy mash note to the deathless Brompton goth queen that, while not abandoning the band’s trademark wham-a-lam MO, is nonetheless suitably clothed in a more (eye)shadowy sheen, subtly appointed with some ghostly undertones of synth and braced by a phalanx of slash-chime guitar. Not a departure so much as a trippy day-trip to moodier climes, it would claim album highlight honors were it not for the Baez-accompanied “One Way Ticket (coda),” enlisting the time-untouched legend to conspire on her late brother-in-law Richard Fariña’s slow-romping, bluesy slice of country rock jangle, a version that, in it’s coda-within-the-coda, drifts into a state of backporch delirium that had me jotting down in my initial notes ‘JJ Cale in an “Eight Miles High” mood.’ Embracing the history it’s simultaneously updating, it’s as fine a finale as A Fragile Tomorrow or their listeners cold hope fo. In short (and as usual for this band), promise delivered.

In that album-opening title salvo Sean asks rhetorically “What if I…hung up my paisley shirt and silver pants and said ‘Fuck art, let’s dance?'” and though the artistry is indeed self-apparent here – and one doubts the splashy sartorial choices will be dispensed with anytime soon and good on ’em – the spirit thriving inside that sentiment, despite the shake-things-up yearn behind it, is exactly what invigorates and drives this record. I say get it, we could all use it.