Portland, Oregon resident Mo Troper's latest album, Natural Beauty, his fourth in all is truly undistilled loveliness. It's an aptly named record as this is unadorned aestheticism. Probably something you'd slot in the Power Pop section of your virtual record shop, the kind of thing nerdy Americans have been coming up with for decades going back to Big Star, dB's Elliott Smith, Fountains of Wayne, The Lemonheads and other usual suspects.
An incredibly accomplished record in terms of the sheer quality of songs on display. It may not be one for diabetics as the saccharine level is consistently high, but Troper really knows what he's doing. His voice has something of the quality of Dean Friedman who pumped out slightly sickly hits in the mid-Seventies, but I'd say that Brian Wilson and the early Beach Boys and particularly In My Room are the true spiritual progenitors of what's going down here. This is Sunshine Indie of the truest and purest grade.
The songs here document pretty much all of the classic tropes of the genre, lost love, teenage ennui, the way that your heart never truly recovers from the first time it was broken but still keeps coming back for more. Natural Beauty is as good a record of this kind as you'll hear this year. Albums like these have a habit of being underappreciated, I shouldn't imagine things will prove otherwise here. Nevertheless, this is a very fine record.
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