It's a lonely job, being a power pop advocate. Starting with the category of "record-collector," you have to descend through quite a few subsets of "obsessed nerd" before you find me and the twenty-six other people that are determined to champion and protect this most maligned of genres.

Being a power pop fan is like leaving the Church of Scientology in order to join a UFO cult.

It's something of a step backwards; a sure-fire way of putting yourself at the end of long line of abuse and disapprobation, where even Trekkies and prog-rockers are permitted to scoff. You risk becoming the pariah's pariah.

The argument against power pop isn't a bad one, either. Its goal, very basically, is to marry the melodicism of the Beatles with The Who's dexedrine and fisticuffs cannon-fire. And what a pointless, redundant, and utterly wasteful exercise that is, whether it's 1973 and you're the Raspberries, or it's 2005 and you're L.A.'s exceptional yet utterly ignored the 88.

The reason me and those twenty-six other guys hang in there is because of bands like the 88, or better still the Singles. Head-Single Vince Frederick is a grand-master when it comes to the kind of chord-progressions that resolve like a gush of endomorphin across the brain-pan, although he sounds angrier on the band's second album, Start Again, which was released two weeks ago, than he did when I first discovered them in 2003. Perhaps Frederick has learned that, with the rare exception, a degree of obscurity is axiomatic to power pop.

Indeed, one of the great unsung bands of the first punk era was an unwieldy gang of rock'n'rollers from San Francisco called the Flamin' Groovies Whenever I hear the Singles, I think of the Groovies. Their 1976 single "Shake Some Action" is like a holy relic to me and the other power pop true-believers.

I've seen grown men weep over its timeless and tireless virtues, and I can guarantee that three decades after first hearing it, I'm still not bored. To this day, when guitarist Cyril Jordan goes "whoo" at the end of the second chorus, it's like I just bit down on a sherbet bon bon laced with amyl nitrate. It stands as the most honest paroxysm of uninhibited teenage joy to ever leap from the mouth of a man about to hit his thirties. Because this kind of thing is important to me, I'm further prepared to say it's the greatest "whoo" on record.

I challenge anybody to prove me wrong.

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