Ken Stringfellow is something like power-pop royalty. Not only is he a great songwriter, responsible for half of the music of the Posies, but he's also kept his plate constantly full over the last decade, working with everyone from REM to Big Star to Scott McCaughey to Ringo Starr. The Posies are the hardest working defunct band in show business-- Stringfellow and fellow Posie John Auer have released more material since the band's breakup than most bands release in an entire career.
And in the midst of all this, Ken found time to start yet another band-- a group called Saltline that only managed to record one EP before splitting. This left Stringfellow with a bunch of songs just lying around doing nothing. So, he penned up a few more and put them all to work on his second solo album, Touched. True to form, it's not a bad batch of tunes.
Stringfellow allows the country tendencies that have always lurked in his songwriting to come to the fore on the opener "Down Like Me." Ron Preston's steel guitar swells in and out of the mix and drummer Eric Marshall keeps things moving at a quick clip as Stringfellow serves up one of the sticky melodies we've by now come to expect from him. Mitch Easter's production is clean and uncluttered, but it sometimes lacks the punch of the Posies' best efforts, like 1993's excellent Frosting on the Beater.
"This One's on You" pulls back the reins and turns back the clock to roughly the time when Bernie Leadon was still in the Eagles. One of the Posies' main strengths was always the harmonies of Auer and Stringfellow. Here, minus Auer, Stringfellow simply layers his own voice and while this works well enough, there's a certain balance that Auer's voice brought to the harmonies of the Posies that's lacking on Touched. On his own, Stringfellow's voice also has a somewhat alarming tendency to sound like Timothy B. Schmidt on the high notes, but this only happens rarely.
Stringfellow naturally includes a few of the power-pop gems that he does so well, like the Sloan-esque "Find Yourself Alone." At first glance, the song is catchy and well-performed, with a monster chorus, but a closer listen reveals several piano and Rhodes tracks filling out the background, adding immensely to the overall texture of the song. If only there were radio stations somewhere that would play this stuff.
"Uniforms" begins over a bed of cello and violin, but quickly segues into loping pop full of cleanly strummed guitars, harpsichord, and even a bit of distant clip-clop percussion nicked straight from Pet Sounds. Atmospheric synths gradually enter the mix, only to give way to a piano interlude that lays the groundwork for the last few verses. The rhythm pushes forward harder than before, and layers of synth wash underneath Stringfellow's multi-tracked voice. It's an impressive little opus that uses a keen sense of arrangement to its fullest advantage.
"Sparrow" is the best of an impressive quartet of classic power-pop songs with one of the album's finest melodies topping another inventive arrangement. Stringfellow makes use of his lowest range in the pre-chorus over fuzzed-out guitars and organs, and offers some impressive guitar and keyboard work in the instrumental bridge. The Hammond-soaked "Reveal Love" comes down a notch, eschewing guitar entirely in the verses, but still offering a massive chorus designed to rattle around your head for days afterward.
But while the more upbeat numbers on Touched are uniformly flawless, things get spotty when Stringfellow departs from that route. "One Morning" is a fine enough acoustic song, full of nicely layered vocals and a great melody, but it's followed by "Spanish Waltz," a song that feels somewhat labored. It veers between some forced distorted passages and vaguely psychedelic sections with odd little guitar parts battling with Stringfellow's otherwise good vocal melody. There's a bombast to the song that's simply unbecoming a songwriter like Stringfellow, whose primary strength is melody.
It's followed by "Fireflies," a quiet, pensive song where the guitar and drums are actually more prominent than the vocals. It works well as a mood piece or interlude, but little else. But it's on "The Lover's Hymn" where he really veers off course. The aforementioned Timothy B. Schmidt resemblance hinted at earlier is in a full bloom here, and the song practically sounds like an outtake from the sessions for "The Long Run." At more than five minutes, it's extremely overlong, and never really develops itself beyond the organ-coated verses, with the exception of some somewhat interesting instrumental bits presented in lieu of a chorus.
Thankfully, Stringfellow gets his bearings again for the closer, "Here's to the Future," and ending Touched in the same territory that Big Star's third album occupied 25 years ago. What begins as an acoustic song is shrouded in a blanket of analog synthesizer during the crescendos between verses, and Marshall punctuates it with orchestral percussion. It's a fitting close to a fine solo effort that's not afraid to take a few chances. No one really knows at this point what will become of the Posies, but as long as Stringfellow keeps putting out music in some form, the future of power-pop looks okay.
