Album Stories is an ongoing series, in which I wax nostalgic about an album and how it fits into my life. There isn't an Album Story for every album I own, but there are certainly enough for a recurring segment.
Previously on Album Stories:
British Sea Power’s The Decline of British Sea Power
Ultimate Painting’s Ultimate Painting
The (International) Noise Conspiracy’s Armed Love
Rocket From The Crypt’s R.I.P RFTC
Today’s album: 2019’s Another Whiff, the sophomore release by The Whiffs, a Kansas City Power-Pop band.
But real quick before we start, two (self)important editorial notes!
First, instead of me inserting the usual I’m gonna get more of these written more often statement, I can tell you instead that the lack of recent Negative Progression updates ties directly into today’s Album Story, so we will cover that by the end of this piece.
Second, when last we talked, back in the 2022 Wrap Bag, I mentioned that I had just recorded an episode of my friend Joy’s fantastic podcast When Yer With. As I noted last time: When Yer With, is “a fly-on-the-wall experience in which you get to hear Joy have pleasant, earnest and interesting conversations with her friends and family.”
Good news: the episode is out now and I think it came out really well (yes, I am biased). Joy and I talked about moving overseas, creative outlets (including this humble ‘zine/blog), online friendships, and of course the unconditional love of Rocket From The Crypt. Get it wherever you get your podcasts (always wanted to say that!) or just click play here:
Ok, now let’s get back on topic and talk about some Kansas City Power-Pop.1
March 2020 - Los Angeles, CA
2020 sucked balls. We all know this and we don’t even need the benefit of hindsight because it sucked in real-time. The truest irony is that it was supposed to be my “vibe out, travel and relax” year after an extremely stressful 2019 at my job. Instead it was a year that fundamentally broke my spirit.
But…in the fist nine weeks or so, 2020 seemed like it maybe was gonna work out really well. As noted in the original Negative Progression ‘zine (later republished here), I got into one of my periodic Power-Pop deep kicks and was jamming tons of PP and PP-adjacent bands from across the decades. The thing is, if I’m on a big power-pop kick you can generally assume things are going well with me.
This was where I found myself in March 2020, thinking that working from home for a month or two2 would be really fun and a nice change of pace (this mindset lasted maybe one or two weeks?) before, things started to spiral downwards in what you might call somewhat of a negative progression.
We do not need to revisit 2020 here, but it really is still very shocking for me to think about how quickly things went from “oh hell yeah, new year, new me, it’s my time to shine” to “multiple anxiety attacks every week, will I ever feel normal again?”
And directly correlated to that pattern was how quickly I went from “listening to multiple hours of power-pop every day” to “not listening to any music at all, just listening to podcasts to drown out my own thoughts instead.”
I did not get back onto my next power-pop kick until June of 2021, 15 months later.
At the epicenter of my March 2020 power-pop kick was Another Whiff, which was released in 2019, but I was late getting around to. It has that most power-pop quality of all, which is that once its over you just wanna play it again, and again, and again, and again.
Another Whiff, as its name might suggest, is the second Whiffs record, but is also the first to feature Joey “Rubbish” Montaro (from The Rubs) and the upgrade is noticeable. It’s also somewhat unique in that this is a modern power-pop record which is not an exercise in nostalgia.
The influences are there (how couldn’t they be) but this is not mimicry or gimmickry. So much so, that Another Whiff breaks from classic power-pop traditions and there are no references to any of the lyrical tropes on my highly unofficial power-pop lyric Power Rankings3.
In the original description that I wrote for what Album Stories would be, I noted that “to achieve perfection in an album [you need] enough good songs, the correct track order, a flow, a vibe, etc.…” and Another Whiff has very much all of those things and is an album that is greater than the sum of its parts4.
Not to say that there aren’t standout songs on this record - there are, I go back and listen to On The Boulevard and What Do You Want Me To Do? a lot - but more to say that playing this record over and over really reveals the big picture. It effortlessly flows from song to song, from melody to melody. No songs clock in at even 3 minutes long (and only 5 of 14 topping 2:30) and with no filler at all across the 14 tracks.
It’s also notable that there are 3 people on songwriting and vocals duty and that it has such a cohesive sound/vibe throughout. It makes sense that they spent a year writing this record in their practice space, seems like it gave all the songs time to marinate in their audio juices (I hate that metaphor but I left it in anyway, just for you.)
The only “problem” with this record is a “problem” for me the writer, not me the listener, which is that it’s so expertly dialed in and executed that there’s only so much you can say about it and patch of purple prose would be exactly what this album is not going for.
In summation: I recommend you listen to this record five times in a row.
March, 2023 - Los Angeles, CA
You may already know that I started doing this writing thing as a direct result of the events of 2020, as a way to organize my thoughts and as a way to tell people about things I wanted to talk to them about while we were stuck at home.
In the original edition of the Negative Progression ‘zine, I wrote about the fascinating documentary Antarctica: A Year On Ice which charts a year on a research station there, and really focuses on the few dozen or so people who spend the deep, dark winter there. I compared the Antarctic winter with the pandemic which I called the “covid winter inside my soul.” (purple prose, huh?)
I concluded that piece comparing the end of an Antarctic winter to how I presumed we would experience the end of the pandemic.
Winter passes and summer returns. People return to the base en-masse, so much so that the winter people find the pace of life and lack of space annoying. The months of darkness end and the sunlight comes back, slowly at first and eventually so much that there’s no more night-time.
And there’s the rub. The “covid-winter” will pass, the world will come back, slowly at first, and then so much and so quickly that this pandemic will fade like a memory of a place where I used to eat lunch in 1998.
And here we find myself, three years later, in an officially5 post-pandemic world, having learned a lot along the way, and back on another power-pop deep kick, the epicenter of which is once again a new Whiffs album, but this time its Scratch 'N' Sniff, their long awaited follow up to Another Whiff.
And here’s the explanation that I promised earlier for the long gaps between editions of Negative Progression6: It's not on hiatus, its not cancelled, its just extremely ad-hoc now.
And that is because the world is back on its normal axis (as much as it can ever be) and because I’m not sat my house with nothing else to do, I am not writing as much, which is actually good! It means things are mostly back to where to where they were 3 years ago7, and who knows maybe 2023 is going to be the year that 2020 was supposed to be.
And if it isn’t, that’s ok. It’ll shake out how it’s supposed to. But for now I’m going to “vibe out, travel and relax” and listen to some fuckin’ power-pop!
Album Rating, Another Whiff: B+
Life Rating, 2020: F-
Life Rating, 2023: TBD
Hardcore fans may recall that Kansas City Power-Pop was a cornerstone of the Chris Whitehead Show on Preston FM. The hardest of hardcore fans may also recall I was once ‘banned’ from talking about it.
I even boldly predicted in our first Zoom team meeting that we’d be back in the office by Memorial Day at best, Independence Day at worst. My coworkers have either forgotten this or are too nice to make fun of how bad a prediction it was, given that three years later all of us are still working remotely (by choice now, but still…)
Compare/Contrast with another fantastic modern power-pop record Radio Sounds by The Speedways, which hits all of these lyrical motifs!
Their own release notes say its the sum of its parts, they undersold themselves.
Official as far as institutions like government agencies say. Your Mileage May Vary.
That said, I do have some half written pieces I need to finish and send to you all.
Weirdly a bunch of things are happening that happened/were suppose to happen in March 2020: I have a new Whiffs album, the excellent HBO reboot of Perry Mason just started airing, I’m about to go on a family road-trip in New England, etc.