Reviews

2nd Grade – Girls and Boys

The Philadelphia-based champions of contemporary power pop deliver a hook-filled concept album that plays more like a sharply dressed gimmick.

At its core, 2nd Grade’s fourth full-length album cheekily recalls a time when teenage longing served as the primary emotional currency. As one of the most steadfast champions of contemporary power pop, the Philadelphia four-piece leans further into the genre’s conventions, splitting its twenty songs evenly between titles that begin with “girls” and those that begin with “boys.” Yet, in revisiting these somewhat antiquated gendered tropes, the band cleverly turns them on their head.

But what good is a concept without an abundance of delightful hooks? One can’t fault primary songwriter Peter Gill’s commitment to retro-leaning aesthetics, evident in everything from the album’s visually pleasing cutout-style cover to its ringing jangly guitars. Gill clearly has the formula down to a science, with much success, with 2022’s Easy Listening currently standing as their best release to date. But after eight years of pairing lean compositions with lengthy tracklists, the band’s once-reliable approach is starting to wear thin.

Whereas previous 2nd Grade releases tapped into a wider range of guitar-driven arrangements, Girls and Boys largely adheres to a single sound palette, making for a somewhat exhaustive listen. To Gill’s credit, he can write a pretty damn good song. Take “Cellophane Girls,” in which Gill, in the grand tradition of Fountains of Wayne’s Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger, inserts off-the-cuff witticisms (“It was Negroni week/and World War IV was in full flower”) into an upbeat, harmony-filled tune. On “Fender Boys,” the band disrupts the song’s handclap-backed, punchy energy with an intriguingly dissonant bridge, offering a welcome jolt of surprise for those who may have begun zoning out halfway through the album.

Perhaps the saving grace of Girls and Boys is that even its more pedestrian-sounding tracks contain nuggets of lyrical brilliance. “Anywhere Girls” features guest vocals from Remember Sports bassist Catherine Dwyer, and her anxious bursts (“Then I cried on my resume/Now I know how Jesse James felt”) will have one chuckling through sobs over its punch-drunk, the Muffs-esque pop-punk. Another highlight arrives right out of the gate on “Catch and Release Boys,” where Gill declares that “The king and queen of self help are cleaning up the American underground,” one of the many blink or you’ll miss it moments as the album begins to wind down. Even if many of the lines on here don’t always cohere, at least Gill and Dwyer deliver them with a wholesomeness that is impossible not to be charmed by.

For all its individual strengths, Girls and Boys feels less like a fully realised concept album and more like a sharply dressed gimmick. Its structure, modelled on something akin to Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand, feels a little played out at this point, and without the melodic detours that make that album so compelling to this day. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that 2nd Grade will continue churning out taut, bittersweet pop with an indie flair and little in the way of pretension. Their songcraft is just that good. But even Fountains of Wayne, coming into Welcome Interstate Managers, understood that the only way to advance their wry instincts was to find new ways of expressing them.

Girls and Boys is out now via Lame-O Records.