Houses & Homes

Album Review

The Bye Bye Blackbirds sound a little like a British Invasion band with more sensitive and thoughtful lyrics on much of their second album, House and Homes. It's not a total retro-mid-'60s sound, also owing something to power pop of later vintage. Nonetheless, both the tunes and the upper-register vocals do often echo some of the poppier Beatlesque groups of yore, or even some of the songs that Graham Gouldman wrote for the likes of the Hollies and Yardbirds. Two tracks that definitely do not fall into such a classification are "Next Door," a dreamy ambient instrumental on which only guitarist/bassist Ian Robertson plays, and "Murray Morgan's Last Dream," a similar but tenser atmospheric piece with fuzzy synthesizer that suggests these fellows might be into early Brian Eno as well as early Beatles. Yet these aren't typical of a record that, for the most part, is upbeat guitar-oriented pop/rock with a tinge of the bittersweet, all original save a cover of the Everly Brothers' obscure mid-'60s song "It Only Costs a Dime."