It's New to Me: Drowning by Tommy Keene (2004)

Illustration titled "My Mother Isn't Old, Irene" by Louise Clark from Isabella Alden's novel Ruth Erskine's Son, 1907

Power-pop fans may argue endlessly over whether Tommy Keene should have been a big star, but there's no doubt that, while mainstream success has eluded him, he's made a name for himself as one of the best sidemen in the business. I saw him play with Robert Pollard's Ascended Masters a few years ago (he was amazing!), but he's probably better known for his work with Paul Westerberg. For example, check out Keene on Letterman, playing an excellent solo and singing backup on "Love Untold" with Westerberg in 1996.

One of the reasons it's hard to pin down Keene's solo work is that it's all over the place - he had a run of bad luck with record companies, and many of his albums are out of print. As a result, I've been picking up anything by Keene that I can find, starting with the older stuff. When Not Lame Records announced that they were closing their shutters at the end of last year, I realized I needed to snag the Keene odds-and-ends compilation they'd released before it went the way of his '80s records. I'm glad I did - Drowning is quite appealing and tidy for an assortment of unreleased tracks. It almost plays like a slightly-too-long Keene album - his clean power-pop sound hasn't changed much over the years, so the time-line that goes with these tracks is not obvious (and Keene doesn't provide any dates in the liner notes, only apologizing for certain out-of-date sounds).

Keene often works with winding melodies that don't hook me on first listen, but his voice and guitar-playing are so good that I go back to the songs until they sink their hooks into me. This tendency is more pronounced on Drowning, obviously - some of these are songs that were rejected by record labels for not having "hit potential", after all - but there's plenty of first-rate Keene tracks here. The title track has a surprisingly immediate chorus and dates back to the mid-'80s, as do several of the other strong tracks on the compilation ("Karl Marx", Disarray"). Keene's cover of the Hollies' "Carrie Anne" (one of my favorite songs ever) is quite nice, up there with his Chilton and Who covers as a great reinterpretation of one of Keene's power-pop progenitors.

There are a handful of unremarkable tracks (I've never heard a power-pop compilation that didn't have at least two songs that seem to meld into one muddled blob of jangle), but most of these castaways "coulda been contenders." My favorite is probably "The Scam and the Flim Flam Man" a song that Keene rightly says should have been on Songs from the Film, although it's no surprise that Geffen didn't give the nod to such a cynical (but sunny-sounding!) song about the recording industry.

"The Scam and the Flim Flam Man" by Tommy Keene