Review Summary: Short, sweet, sad.
Portland songwriter Mo Troper makes discursive, elliptical power pop for fans of loud guitars and short songs. 2021’s
Dilettante was a 28-track sprawl, a series of hooky sketches that varied wildly in tone (a positive) and quality (a negative).
MTV is a more conventional record, covering 15 tracks in a relatively lean half hour.
The pop music of the 60s looms large over
MTV. Troper’s fuzzy guitar and trebly bass tones evoke a classic, garage-y form of psych rock, and singles “I Fall Into Her Arms” and “The Only Living Goy in New York” are clearly oblique takes on The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel (down to the name of the song!) respectively. I find “I Fall Into Her Arms” particularly enchanting, it’s all wobbly harmonies and Harrison-esque guitar over a tense chord progression.
The vocals on the record are absolutely drenched in effects, to the point that they will almost certainly turn off some listeners. Troper runs his voice through pitch-shifters, tremolo, and reverb, sometimes all at once. It frequently sounds like he’s just taken a big pull off of a helium balloon. On one of the album’s stranger songs, the winding and raucous “Power Pop Chat”, he is more or less unintelligible.
The lyrics tend toward the dark, ranging from the generally melancholy to the grim and grotesque. Troper riffs on feeling alienated and lonely in a crowd, on his own perceived fraudulence, on his body betraying him. Even the love songs are more about being saved from his own self-loathing than any sort of romantic joy. While the music frequently evokes a sense of joy, the words seem more concerned with simply escaping the throes of dysphoria.
But the music is exceedingly euphoric! The hooks, especially across the first two thirds of the record, are pretty bulletproof. Listen to the maximalist “Waste Away” or the depressive jangle-pop of “Play Dumb” or the screaming guitar on the “I’m the King of Rock ‘n Roll”. If there is a major flaw to be found on
MTV, it’s that the last third largely seems to abandon the energy of the front of the record. The songs here are more abrasive (“Coke Zero”) or minimalist (“Under My Skin”) or alienating (“Final Lap”). I respect the attempt at variety and naked weirdness, but it drains some of the spark from the record for me.
Still, I see
MTV fulfilling the sort of niche that 2nd Grade’s
Hit to Hit did for me back in 2019: a set of eccentric, varied power pop songs that I can throw on and enjoy over and over.
