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Who:
The Mayflies USA w/The Connells

When:
Thursday, Feb. 17

Where:
Moose's

The Mayflies USA play 21st century power pop

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

You know this sound: cascading guitars, sweet tenor harmonies, big hooks with minor-chord falls that rise into major-chord resolutions. You know it because it's been a constant part of the musical landscape since about 1965 when the Beatles, Byrds, and Beach Boys put together the pieces.

The blueprint is so sturdy that songs like "And Your Bird Can Sing" or "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" don't sound like they've aged a day. And power-pop disciples from Big Star to Matthew Sweet have managed to avoid being tagged as revivalists because when it's done well, the music is its own preservative. It is tied less to any one place or time than to some mysterious set of pleasure centers deep inside the Euro-American brain. Put simply, it just sounds right.

We're three or four generations down the road from the forefathers now, and if there are only a handful of major post-1960s figures in that lineage—inarguably Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, probably Aimee Mann, debatably Robyn Hitchcock and Peter Buck—there have been an awful lot of minor pleasures. Cheap Trick, the Church, Let's Active, Matthew Sweet, and Teenage Fanclub have all produced at least an album's worth of great songs, and dozens of others have contributed one or two chime-guitar gems.

Somewhere on that spectrum you can put the Mayflies USA, four fresh-faced guys from Chapel Hill, N.C. who fit the mold snugly—almost too snugly. With two guitarists named Matt, shaggy Beatle bangs, and a relentlessly tuneful debut album called Summertown, the Mayflies (the "USA" part is a rock-geek joke, there are no other Mayflies) could be a WB network idea of a cool rock band. Except that a WB network band wouldn't sound this good.

From the opening arpeggios of "You and Me" through the pitch-perfect melancholy of "The Apple" and "Baby's Got Her Own Ideas" to the irresistible chorus of "A Quick Look Ahead" ("She heard that song on the radio/ She forgot where she had to go"), the Mayflies make their press kit's comparisons to Revolver, #1 Record and so forth seem at least like forgivable hyperbole. These are songs you start humming the first time you hear them.

Matt McMichaels, at 27 the old man of the band, knows it's easy to fall into a "file under Big Star" slot. "I'd like to think if we can put out a few more records we can stand on our own two feet a little more," he says. "Big Star was not all that different from the Beatles, on paper at least. But over the years, people have acknowledged that they really were doing something different."

One thing the Mayflies have in common with both of those forebears is a cluster of songwriters. McMichaels, fellow guitarist Matt Long, and bassist (and Knoxville native) Adam Price trade off writing and singing, although Summertown is so cohesive musically and thematically, you'd be hard-pressed to pick out who wrote what. McMichaels calls it more a natural affinity than an effort to produce any particular kind of song. "It's definitely not calculated... I mean, if you're writing rock songs, you're often writing about girls or cars or drugs or something, so that's what we write about."

It's probably no accident that the Mayflies came together in Chapel Hill, which has served as kind of an East Coast base for guitar pop at least since the early '80s, when both the dBs and Let's Active emerged. dBs' co-founder Chris Stamey (himself a former Alex Chilton sideman) produced Summertown, and McMichaels acknowledges the regional influence.

"There's definitely an aesthetic here," he says. "I've never been able to put my finger on it. It's an easy place to live...It's all about location. I mean, the MC5 came out of Detroit for a reason too."

In keeping with that heritage, the Mayflies are on tour with the Connells, whose Carolina jangle was among the freshest things on MTV in the late '80s. "They're kind of like our uncles, I guess," McMichaels says with a laugh. "It's been really good, because they're really professional and they've been doing this forever... They can still drink us under the table, though."

If power pop has never really gone out of style, it's also never exactly been a ticket to the top. Every year produces two or three guitar-driven nuggets, which as often as not end up in the one-hit wonders column. (Recent example: Tai Bachman's derivative "She's So High," which is inferior to every one of the 14 tracks on Summertown.)

"You mean like the Fastball thing," McMichaels says. "Yeah, we were just talking about that the other day. It's like a lottery or something. You could be a winner, you could be hit by a car. It seems like most people kind of get what we're doing, so that's a remote possibility."

Still, his hopes for the band are both grander and more long-term than any quick trip through the Buzz Bin. Maybe remembering that Big Star never sold any records to speak of, McMichaels says wistfully, "Eventually, if we keep it up long enough, hopefully people will start comparing other bands to us."