Marshall Crenshaw

Power-pop fanatics -- the children of Big Star and Cheap Trick's In Color -- still genuflect in the direction of Marshall Crenshaw, an album whose only crime was to come out at about the same time as synth pop was usurping the place of guitar-based songwriting on the charts. The melodies and arrangements are so clean, plain-spoken, and punchy that it's possible to take their make-it-look-easy brilliance for granted. Most of the songs were recorded by a boisterous trio, though the hard-rocking "Cynical Girl" is a Crenshaw one-man-band tour de force.

That Crenshaw has never quite equaled his de-but isn't so much a slight on him as an indication of just how completely he realized his ambitions, fusing hillbilly twang, Motown's tambourine-inflected groove, and brisk Beatles-by-way-of- Everly Broth-ers melodies. His recordings all inevitably are dis-tinguished by his concisely inventive guitar playing, boyish tenor vocals, and songs addressing love's post-adolescent gray areas. Their charm lies as much in what he steadfastly leaves out: cleverness, earnestness, sanctimony.

That said, he has tried to shake up his formula by trying a variety of production approaches. Field Day remains his most divisive recording for that reason; Steve Lillywhite swamps Crenshaw's fresh-faced tunes in echo and bombast. Downtown is something of a baroque roots-pop album, with session pros giving Crenshaw's short, sharp tunes a walloping directness. But his late-'80 struggles to widen his audience included the covers-dominated Good Evening, on which he resorts to covering schlock-mistress Diane Warren. Life's Too Short marks an attempt to revisit the smart, sparse turf of the first album, but with an arena-rock sense of proportion: Ed Stasium's slamming production, and Crenshaw fronting an all-star power-trio that includes Kenny Aronoff on drums and Fernando Saunders on bass.

In the '90s, his recording pace slowed, and even his studio albums are padded with filler: #447 includes no less than three instrumentals. But, as usual, his choice of covers is astute, in particular Grant Hart's "Twenty-Five Forty-One," from Miracle of Science. Midlife reckoning and melancholy songs dominate What's in the Bag?, even as Crenshaw's pop sensibilities remain acute and his guitar work continues to astonish. Never an artist burdened by conceptual designs, Crenshaw and the enduring charms of his three-minute she-done-me-wrong jingle-jangles are better heard on the career-spanning compilation This Is Easy. (GREG KOT)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide