Willie Wisely

Not quite as varied or top-flight as She, Turbosherbert is nevertheless still quite a treat from one of the most overlooked great indie pop singer/songwriters of the decade. A few of its songs ("Flowers for the Lady," the supper-club lounge of "Party Dress") veer stylistically closer toward MOR than they were perhaps intended to, but for the most part Wisely again luxuriates in '70s-steeped, classically AM-ready power pop, with its mix of sensitively strummed soft acoustic and immaculately raunchy electric guitars and its judicious employment of chunky piano chording, while adding some of the jangle of the '80s college radio crowd and the same glossy '90s veneer as compatriots like the Posies and Matthew Sweet. Too bad Wisely didn't manage at the time of the album's original release to find the same fan base as those artists, because it (and even more so its predecessor, She, a real lost pop masterpiece) deserved as large an audience as Dear 23 or Girlfriend. Speaking of stylistic simpatico, with the fine "Raincan" the singer/songwriter officially added his name to the Big Star family tree, but elsewhere ("Bygones"), Wisely married jump-suited ELO synths with some of the more up-to-date tricks of the era (specifically hip-hop's turntable scratching). And the other songs here? "She Said Yeah," "Home by Friday," and "Doorbells" are as good as any Wisely had yet written. ~ Stanton Swihart, All Music Guide