Uptight!Teenage Kicks
Uptight!
Action Town Records

When the power of recording technology seems to demand that young musicians produce works of ever-increasing drama and complexity, it's nice to see that some people still gravitate toward understatement. On the brief swan song Uptight!, released posthumously in October -- the band broke up last March -- short-lived Houston trio the Teenage Kicks deliver in scant spades the charming rock that frontman Kirke Campbell originally learned in Carter Brown from local punk-sage John Sears.

Judging from the band name, pulled from the 1970s Irish power-pop band the Undertones, the Kicks were aiming for a mod revival, but with their simple, driving style and overenunciated vocals, they've hit something more akin to '90s pop-punk bands like the Groovie Ghoulies and the Mr. T Experience. In this, the band has the benefit of timing, since almost nobody plays this type of music anymore, and it goes down easy when one is no longer completely sick of it. Uptight! isn't what one would call innovative -- there's probably not a riff on this album you couldn't find elsewhere -- but that's hardly the point. Delivered with the right ratio of energy to self-regard, the songs are appealing, no doubt.

The band's lyrics are on a different level. Campbell deftly weaves the standard disaffection of adolescence together with jaded scenesterism, personal score-settling, and vague, almost Dadaist agit-prop. Often, all four are mashed together in just under three minutes, as in "I'm Not Surprised."

Your fame is overrated and your dance moves are contrived. Why can't we end this fucking war?. . . Aren't we sick of all these lectures on autonomy? Aren't we sick of waiting for the next 7" single to set us free?

It's a clever and clear-eyed homage to punk-rock that revels in the unfocused angst of youth while accepting its inevitable dissolution.