By Greg Glasgow, Camera Music Writer
June 16, 2006

Four Denver bands revive a "lost genre" of rock tonight at Denver's Three Kings Tavern, 60 S. Broadway — power-pop, the post-Beatles rock genre perfected in the '70s by artists such as Todd Rundgren, Big Star and the Raspberries.

Emphasizing ultra-hooky melodies, catchy guitar riffs and vocal harmonies, the form apparently is catching on again among bands such as Denver's Six Months to Live, which shares the stage at tonight's show with the Nancy Drews, the StartUps and the Knew.

Six Months to Live singer and guitarist Greg Hill, aka Soapy Argyle, describes power pop as "basically Beatles-derivative music that has stupider lyrics." [note: SMTL lyrics are not stupid ] He first applied the term to his band after hearing some classic power pop on the radio.

"We were doing our thing and we were actually looking for a genre to pigeonhole ourselves in, because you've got to do that, and I was listening to some Badfinger, and I was like, 'That's us!,'" says Hill, 33. [note: Hill does not know why he said this; it never happened and he does not care for Badfinger] "Badfinger, they have really stupid lyrics generally [note: replace “generally” with “always ”], but the music is redeemed just by the yumminess that it gives. But then you have bands like Big Star, who actually could get kind of profound. So it runs the gamut. I like that."

The bands on tonight's bill won't be the first Denver bands to resurrect the genre — Dressy Bessy, the Apples in Stereo and other Elephant 6 bands did the same thing in the '90s [note: not exactly the same thing. DB and AIS were less power, more pop. SMTL lack the bubblegum component of said bands, especially the former, for whom they opened at the Fox in July and managed to annoy the hell out of (according to the testimony of a third party who was hammered at the time and who therefore might have been exaggerating) by discussing testicles for half an hour backstage before the show], and some of them are still going strong. Still, Hill sees the typically upbeat, fun style [note: SMTL sings the saddest song ever written, I'm So Very Blue] as a good antidote to Denver's often too-cool-for-school indie-rock scene.

"It seems like in Denver there's an audience for everything. But they're ripe for the power pop," he says. "When we started Six Months to Live, the original drummer and I, we'd just seen the Shins play at the Gothic, and we liked that band but we saw them play and we were just complaining to each other about how boring they are on stage.

"The music's brilliant, but they [note: we are not certain who "they" refers to] just stood there, and we started bitching about how the indie music in Denver just doesn't have a lot of emotion and people stand on stage and there's a lot of — I don't want to sound like a mean guy [note: Hill wanted to sound like a mean guy], but it just seemed like they were really trying to look disinterested.

"The way they approach music and songs is they just have this sort of deliberate ignorance, which is great, that's what rock 'n' roll is in some ways, but we just want to put a little more effort into learning our instruments, we want to sing and sing in harmony — I think Denver is maybe ready for something more musically interesting and theatrically fun." [note: after receiving a severe beating, Hill agreed that all subsequent interviews must be conducted with full band present ]