It Doesn't Get Better Than This
Posted by mwsmedia at 12:16 pm on 05 Aug 2004

Here’s a beautiful dream about a miracle band: Elvis Costello, Chris and Glenn Tilbrook, and Nick Lowe sit down to write some songs. Elvis and the Tilbrook brothers share vocals. They bring in Jim Babjak and Pete Ham to play guitar. Once they start recording, Nick and Pete Anderson produce the demos. Hanging out in the shadows, just out of sight but palpable presences, are John, Paul, George, and Ringo, muttering approval through their proud smiles.

Good news – the dream is real, embodied by Southern California’s Eugene Edwards. His debut album, “My Favorite Revolution” (Tallboy Records TBO104) is a power-pop gem.

Like any precious stone, Edwards’ music is the result of years of influence by the elements that surround it. A bit raw, those influences are easily discernable when you first encounter the fourteen songs on the CD. Some tracks make you blink – is this a lost track from Elvis Costello before Mitchell Froom and got a hold of him? Is that sweet slide guitar sampled from a Badfinger song you somehow missed?

Derivative, yes -- Edwards even slyly (and not so subtly) seems to acknowledge the history on his sleeve with the first two words of “It Doesn’t Get Better Than This” -- but this record is so full of hooks, clever bridges, and sing-along choruses you really shouldn’t care. Repeated listening, like tumbling and polishing the gem, allows Edwards’ own charm and appeal to shine through. These tunes – twelve driving pop bouncers and a couple of warm ballads – are a thesis of sorts that earns Edwards graduation from Rock School with a small alphabet of letters after his name. The next record should build on the “research” “My Favorite Revolution” represents and be a truly original contribution to the pop canon.

It’s impossible to deny how good this first effort is. I’m one of those poor fools who spends about ten hours a week in his car. “My Favorite Revolution” is the first album since Rhett Miller’s “The Instigator” that has earned repeated, non-stop play on my daily commute. While comparisons between the two are applicable, Miller’s latest effort barely made it through one listening before I popped Edwards back in.

Lyrically, Eugene Edwards gives us songs about flawed, sympathetic characters (and their flawed, sympathetic girlfriends.) The subjects are not so personal as to lose their universal appeal – helplessly watching an old friend’s destructive experimentation (“Your Own Nightmare”), feeling the stranger at an ex’s house (“At Your Place"), shameless adoration of an unreachable icon (“All About You”), seeming the better person while inside you seethe and plan (“Not That Kind of Girl”.) Perhaps the warmest, most complex moment on the record is “I’d Like To Think So" a meditation on a first love that exudes kind wishes for the past while carefully concealing trouble in the present. Who hasn’t been there?

In an era when pop music is defined by whining haircuts and silicon teenage graduates from the Disney Channel, Eugene Edwards’ “My Favorite Revolution” is a jovial poke in the ribs to draw us back to what enduring music can and should be about – fun, truth, and sincerity. Once you order this record, get on Eugene Edwards’ mailing list and go see his band. They play about every five minutes all over Southern California, and occasionally points beyond.

A must!