Six Months To Live
This Is What Happens
The power-pop underground exists in a sort of blissful parallel dimension to the mainstream. Each year, hundreds of albums are released to a slight audience of aging record geeks and pop neophytes—and overlooked by the underground press and influential tastemaking critics alike. It’s a dead-end career of preaching to the converted—and the ultimate ambition for countless bands like Six Months To Live.
The group's farewell album, This Is What Happens, is a finale made for the genre, and the foursome couldn’t have found a more fitting way to say goodbye. Six Months stays true to its back-to-basics guitar aesthetic, mixing traces of middle years Kinks by way of Wilco with the sun-drenched sparkle of The Zombies in an Apples In Stereo kind of way. Held together with an elitism that dutifully avoids anything obvious between Big Star and Britpop, This Is What Happens is double black-diamond, experts-only power pop that’s almost proudly resigned to its niche market.
“Friend Of Mine” lets rhythm of Merseybeat riffs wrestle with a Californian sunshine, in the classic guitar-pop proportions that define most of the album. “Carol Is” and “Let The Guitar Burn” rope in the faintest traces of roots rock, with their acoustic guitars and deliberate rhythms, though neither is present enough to throw the band out of its carefully cultivated pop-purist zone.
You don’t form a classic power-pop band because you want to save rock 'n' roll, become a major-league rock star, or impress the hip, young blogger set. You do it because you love the form and want to try to chase down genre perfection. It’s a shame Six Months To Live is calling it a day, as This Is What Happens finds songwriting success in an inherently unsuccessful enterprise. Grade: B
