It's Pop Music, So Suck It

As a teenager, "pop" seemed like a dirty word. Back in the boy-band-and-girl-group era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, pop music was synonymous with prefabricated trash and soulless teenyboppers. N'Sync even wrote a song called "Pop" that attempted to defend the genre and I didn't buy a word of it.

But here in 2012, everything is different. Did the world change or did I? The music industry is now rife with incredible pop bands, and there's no quicker way to my heart than with a perky rhythm and a harmony-laden chorus hook. And thankfully, Yukon Blonde seems to agree with me. The Vancouver band's second album, Tiger Talk, is due out on Mar. 20, and it's a brisk and punchy affair that's all about pop, pop, pop.

This marks a subtle but noticeable change from Yukon Blonde's self-titled debut from 2010. Sure, that album had its share of hummable tunes, but its jangly folk undertones meant that it was most frequently compared to '70s rock staples like Badfinger, Fleetwood Mac, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

On Tiger Talk, however, the melodies are sweeter, the tempos faster, and the harmonies more Beach Boys than Laurel Canyon. It's by no means a radical departure, but the brazen catchiness, not to mention the in-your-face guitars, make it clear that Yukon Blonde isn't trying to play it safe on this second go-around.

That much is clear from the album's opening lyric, as the stomping "My Girl" begins with the line, "You get these urges to just drive when you're drunk/I have these urges to just ride along." The campaigners over at MADD would probably have a thing or two to say about the ethics of all this, and they'd be right, but there's no denying that it's a hell of a way to grab the listener's attention.

From there, things get even better: the standout "Radio" is a bubblegum punk gem in the "Should I Stay or Should I Go" mould, while the similarly giddy "Breathing Tigers" contains such hard-hitting percussion that I'm still not sure whether it's a drum machine or a real kit.

Hell, even the slow songs sound badass. The cinematic piano ballad "Guns" contains the awesomely contradictory lyric "You can wish on stars/And crash the fuck out of cars," while "Oregon Shores" moves from cloudburst choruses to moody comedowns and reaches its peak with a mammoth motherfucker of a guitar solo.

All of which goes to prove something that I wish I could have told my 14-year-old self: that pop music can be dangerous, exciting and artistically pure while still offering the instant gratification that radio-friendly music is supposed to. If only those twerps in N'Sync had sung about that, maybe I would have believed them. (Not you, JT, we're still chill.)