Pulsars

Be honest, dear reader: you'd just about crap your pants to get back to the eighties. Everywhere you turn, you see eighties clubs, movies ("The Wedding Singer"), CD compilations of eighties music, and even stars of the eighties on the comeback trail (Michael J. Fox, anyone?). For the past few years, America has been obsessed with harkening back to a kinder, greedier era. We're all about retro, obsessed with the days of silver-sequined gloves and finding the beef.

Based on this endless and inexplicable nostalgia kick, Pulsars should be sitting atop the pop music heap, holding court at #1 while their tours fill stadiums across the country. It's unfortunate that they aren't a hot band, because their unique brand of nineties "new wave" deserves a listen. Picking up where the synth and drum-machine filled pop of the mid-eighties left off, Pulsars deliver a surprising mix of eighties sound and lyrical themes with a nineties feel.

This duo out of Chicago crafts music that is new, yet sounds eerily familiar. You'll swear that you heard "Tunnel Song" or "Owed to a Devil" at the Culture Club last Friday on the all- eighties dance floor, but it's brand-spankin' new pop music. David Trumfio, guitarist and songwriter for Pulsars, understands precisely what has made eighties pop so enduring in spite of its dated (and at times awkward) sound: HOOK, HOOK, HOOK. When you pop in Pulsars' self-titled debut, melodies pour from the stereo speakers with the ease of a cold drink heading down your throat on a hot summer day.

Trumfio has an uncanny ear for an amazing hook, and he has crammed this debut effort full of a crapload of them. But Trumfio is also canny enough to understand that a hook isn't just about a pretty melody, so he loads the arrangements with even more hooks. Some of these are courtesy of the greatest horn lines heard on a pop record since Dexy's Midnight Runners, provided by famed trumpeter Herb Alpert (of Tijuana Brass fame, who happened to be recording at the same studio as Pulsars and offered to chip in on several tracks).

Lyrically, Trumfio is into sci-fi, nonsense, and love, often combining the three into some fascinating concoctions. There's a They Might Be Giants-ish ring to his words, but minus the confounding obscurity. When he sings about robots and old Apple computers, you feel no compulsion to search for deeper meaning. These just happen to be great pop songs about robots and old Apple computers. On "Suffocation," an Erasure dance beat is combined with some depressing lyrical turns worthy of Kurt Cobain and his grungey ilk: "Love's like suffocation/It drags you under, makes you dizzy...That was the fifth mistake/I guess I'm just a first-rate flake." Wacky, cheery stuff.

In taking up the "new wave" mantle from such stalwarts as Dexy's Midnight Runners, Erasure, and New Order, Pulsars have crafted some of the most creative and fun POP music of recent memory. It's good to see someone doing something productive with this retro-eighties cultural obsession, instead of simply cranking a "New Wave Hits" compilation and covering a Cars single as a B-side. Sometimes the future of pop can be found buried in its past, and the Pulsars make a good argument for the worth of "new wave" with their debut album. And if you don't care for it, then you can just take on me.