The roots of power pop

Further to my post on the Everlys' Two Yanks In England, an album that I confess I'd not heard of until picking it up earlier this year, I've just read an enlightening review by Edd Hurt for Nashville Scene of the new Big Star biography and album. Hurt cites Two Yanks In England as the missing link between the British guitar pop of the Beatles and the Who and the power pop of Big Star:

"To say ... that all power pop derives from The Who is to ignore what may be the Ur-power-pop statement, the Everly Brothers’ 1966 Two Yanks in England, a brilliant, neglected (and recently reissued) record featuring songs by the Hollies, and a work that one-ups the Beatles by putting a peculiarly Southern American spin—lost, melancholy, subtly tortured—on the basic formula.

"Big Star, the Memphis band led by Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, are the group whose early ’70s albums go a step further and define power pop as a synthesis of British pop music and the West Coast post-folk-rock of the Buffalo Springfield, Gene Clark and Moby Grape, with an admixture of the spare, oblique style of Stax Records. And like the Everlys’ Two Yanks in England, Big Star’s albums give the Beatles back to Americans."

I can hear what he means; it's what's wrong with the Everlys' record in the sense that they don't sound as Swinging London as they'd hoped; but it's also what's great about the album in that they bring something to the table that the Beatles, Who and Hollies themselves aspired to: authentic southern soul.