It’s October, which means football and hockey are back and playoff baseball is hot, hot, hot. So, in the spirit of a classic barstool sports debate, here are some statistics:
This week, the Philadelphia pop band 2nd Grade will release Scheduled Explosions, their third full-length studio album since May of 2020.
The first of those—2020’s Hit To Hit—featured 24 tracks, 18 of which ran less than two minutes long. The average track length was 1:43.
The second—2022’s Easy Listening—was slightly more conventional for a pop-rock record, with an average track length of 2:11 and three songs that stretched beyond the three-minute mark—extended jams by 2nd Grade’s standards.
Scheduled Explosions outdoes them both with regard to brevity: 23 tracks come in under 39 minutes total for an average of 1:41. A highlight of the album’s second half, “Jingle Jangle Nuclear Meltdown,” is 33 seconds long.
Add it all up and you’ve got 63 tracks released in about three-and-a-half years, clocking in at an average of less than 1:50.
What does it all mean? Not much if the songs aren’t good! But the vast majority of them are, and if you come across one that you don’t find appealing, just wait a minute or two and it’ll be over. You’ll be on to the next one.
Therein lies at least part of the charm of 2nd Grade: This is not just a terrific little pop band, it’s also a cornucopia of ideas sprung from the mind of Peter Gill, a prolific songwriter with an apparently bottomless supply of catchy melodies in his head and a drive to get as many of them out into the world as possible. In this way, his work recalls that of one of his major influences, Guided By Voices’ Robert Pollard, who has never shied away from releasing tunes that are highly addictive and feel not quite finished.
Gill’s songs, to be clear, usually do feel finished, and he is an incredibly efficient pop-smith; “Instant Nostalgia” from Scheduled Explosions, for example, races through two verses, two choruses and a noisy outro in 102 seconds, with barely a moment to breathe along the way. Later on the album, the 67-second “All About You” follows a similar structure and pace, but adds a quick trip across a meta-commentary bridge: “History is written by winners / The losers write power pop / And it’s all about you.”
Indeed, 2nd Grade are sometimes a gentle indie pop band and sometimes a buzzy noise pop band, but most often they’re a bite-sized power pop band. There is undeniable power in the electric guitars of “Live from Missile Command” and “Triple Bypass in B-Flat” and “Uncontrollably Cool,” and that’s just the first three tracks on the album—there are at least a dozen more just like them. On “Like Otis Redding,” the band sounds fuzzed out and shambolic, like the aforementioned GBV. On “Made Up My Own Mind,” they sound crisp and jangly like Teenage Fanclub. And sometimes, there are hints of twang and ‘60s soul in the mix, as on “Bureau of Autumn Sorrows” and “Like A Wild Thing,” respectively. Here, 2nd Grade bring to mind the rock ‘n’ roll roots and restless spirit of Alex Chilton.
Gill is not afraid to throw curveballs, either. There’s a killer tune in “68 Comeback,” but it’s buried behind a claustrophobic production style and a series of what sounds like tape malfunctions. The first half of “Evil Things” is a perfectly pleasant pop song, while the second half sounds like someone throwing a set of kitchen knives down a long metal stairwell. And “Crybaby Semiconductor” is basically 51 seconds of musical choices—dissonant notes, accelerating tempo, glitchy noises—that sound like they shouldn’t work. But they do. Or at least they might, if you have an appetite for deeply weird pop songs.
It’s like this all the way through Scheduled Explosions: Song after song of sharp hooks, lo-fi vibes and winky lyrical references to Pepperidge Farms and the great Dougie Poole, all swirling around into something that hangs together as a brilliant whole, but also as a motley bunch of parts. Either way you hear it, it’s going to be bouncing around in your head for a while, and that’s the goal: “When you close your eyes / I wanna be on your mind,” sings Remember Sports’ Catherine Dwyer on the album’s closing track, “I Wanna Be On Your Mind,” which was written, according to Gill, from the perspective of a song that wants to be stuck in a listener’s head. Mission most definitely accomplished.
Ben Salmon is a committed night owl with an undying devotion to discovering new music. He lives in the great state of Oregon, where he hosts a killer radio show and obsesses about Kentucky basketball from afar. Ben has been writing about music for more than two decades, sometimes for websites you’ve heard of but more often for alt-weekly papers in cities across the country. Follow him on Twitter at @bcsalmon.
