![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/pencils_redrawn.jpg\")
Have you ever heard of The Pencils? Me neither. But as it happens, this band from Hertfordshire, England made some exuberant powerpop in the very early 1980s. For their trouble the band met with little success. But when they\u2019re remembered at all, they\u2019re remembered fondly.<\/p>\n
The folks at Kool Kat Musik are among the Pencils cognoscenti. After a German label belatedly released a Pencils album in 1984, things were quiet for some time. But in 2012 Kool Kat released an anthology of Pencils recordings. That same year the label released another set, Early Sketches<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Happily, those releases came to the attention of some of powerpop\u2019s artists of the 21st<\/sup> century. So now (and again from Kool Kat) we have Redrawn: A Tribute to The Pencils<\/i>. Perhaps because the group had\/has a limited catalog, the 2CD set takes a highly unusual approach to the material. The first disc features 11 Pencils songs, covered by the same number of current-day acts. The second compact disc features those same 11 songs, in the same<\/i> order, covered by eleven other<\/i> artists.<\/p>\n The group\u2019s streamlined musical approach highlights pop songwriting values, skilled crafting of melodic hooks, and tight, taut arrangement. All of those values are celebrated by the artists who cover Pencils material on this collection. The CD doesn\u2019t include detailed session notes and the like, but it\u2019s perhaps worth noting that the set opens with a reading of \u201cI Won\u2019t Lie\u201d by The Jetz, which is the band that Pencils members were in previously.<\/p>\n Among the group\u2019s most well-known (a relative term, that) is \u201cIf You Really Wanna Hurt Somebody,\u201d a minor pop classic in the mold of The Romantics. Automat cover it nicely on Disc One, but Nick Frater\u2019s version on the second disc is the clear winner here.<\/p>\n And if there\u2019s any issue with this collection, it\u2019s just that: tribute\/cover albums by their nature invite comparison, and oftentimes the remakes don\u2019t measure up to the originals. Having two versions of each song only increases the likelihood that listeners will measure one against another.<\/p>\n Happily, since most won\u2019t know the original versions, the songs on Redrawn<\/i> can be weighed on their own merits. The inevitability of the two discs competing is simply a baked-in characteristic of the set. Fortunately, the material is top-notch, the performances are spirited, and the quality is consistent. The songwriting is undeniably derivative: one can almost pick out the song or songs that inspired each of the Pencils originals — but the group were clearly excellent students of the pop form. And derivative doesn’t mean bad.<\/p>\n Considered outside of context \u2013 ignoring that these are covers of songs you\u2019re unlikely to know, by artists you might (but probably won\u2019t) know \u2013 Redrawn: A Tribute to The Pencils<\/i> plays like a very good powerpop radio station without commercials. Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have you ever heard of The Pencils? Me neither. But as it happens, this band from Hertfordshire, England made some exuberant powerpop in the very early 1980s. For their trouble […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25727,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,49,55,65],"tags":[1259,5205],"class_list":["post-25726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-compilation","category-new-release","category-powerpop","category-review","tag-kool-kat-musik","tag-the-pencils","cat-19-id","cat-49-id","cat-55-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25726"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25735,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25726\/revisions\/25735"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}