Mike Adams, Honestly:Best of Boiler Room Classics (2014)

[ Flannelgraph Records, 2014 ]

Few current “power pop” artists navigate the inherent trickiness of that sub-genre as expertly as Bloomington, Indiana local Mike Adams. I describe the form as tricky because it requires a dexterity that’s easy to attempt, but hard to master: sticky, major-key hooks built around overdriven guitars that trouble the line between pop sensibility and a more unpolished aesthetic, all delivered with a certain knowing smirk. Smirk too big, and you slip into parody. Smirk with too much subtlety, though, and you’re just another self-serious songwriter with a guitar.

Mike Adams walks this tightrope more skillfully than most. Take his band’s stage moniker, for example—Mike Adams at His Honest Weight—which winks at its audience through wry self deprecation while also making a claim to sincerity. We’re promised Mike Adams, honestly, and that’s what we seem to be getting on his excellent sophomore effort, Best of Boiler Room Classics (Flannelgraph, 2014).

This delicate negotiation of self-awareness and sincerity is precisely what makes this collection of songs so compelling. “I’m Worried” is a particularly powerful example, detailing Adams’ crushing anxiety as his newborn son underwent multiple emergency open heart surgeries.  (He’s “doing fine now!” according to the Flannelgraph Records website.) This incredibly tender song is also the catchiest of the bunch, and the fact that Adams uses its infectious momentum to probe something so deeply serious and personal underscores what’s so remarkable about his approach to music. In a masterful moment of pop trickery, the song turns on a line from The Cure’s 1987 single, “Just Like Heaven,” and repurposes it: “Show me, show me, show me / how you do that trick that keeps you calm.” Soon after, he brings us even closer to its emotional core, crooning, “I never knew I felt the kind of love / holding me up, until I ran out of luck.”

Elsewhere, Best of Boiler Room Classics recalls a veritable golden age of emotive 90s guitar pop outfits like Teenage Fanclub and Superchunk, updated by drum machines, ambient flourishes, and slicker production values. In its more traditional moments, the album explores familiar signposts of love and longing—“How am I supposed to / get along if I don’t see your face?” he asks in the slow-burning centerpiece, “A Woman Is the New Man”—but it always feels believable, never trite. The final result is a distinctly human-sized LP that establishes Mike Adams not simply as a premiere force in the Bloomington scene, but also as one of the most exciting artists working in alternative pop music nationally.

On record and onstage, Adams makes the case for the importance of that human scale in music, and it’s hard to oversell how successfully he argues it. I should mention here that he and his band are known to take the stage in costumes ranging from clergymen to beekeepers—a move that, somehow, doesn’t belie the seriousness of his work. In the Mike Adams universe, these pieces can sit side by side without friction, much in the way that life contains a variety of disparate sensations often firing in tandem with one another. In this sense, Adams is giving us the “honest weight” of experience, proving that the glum doesn’t have to be gloomy, and the sweet doesn’t have to be saccharine.

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Catch Mike Adams at His Honest Weight on tour this fall, beginning Jan. 8 with Say Hi and Advance Base at The Empty Bottle in Chicago. For the full tour schedule, visit the band's Tumblr.