If you’re not on the Dressy Bessy bandwagon, man, you’re missing out of some of the greatest summer pop records ever made.

Well, okay, maybe not best ever. Like I’m qualified to tell you so. But they’re some of the best summer songs I’ve ever heard: sugar-sweet with enough of a kick to leave an aftertaste. This is an effect the Denver band have been trying to perfect for years; anyone who remembers their Pink Hearts Yellow Moons era knows how twee they once were—almost painfully so, depending on your tastes. As is usually the case, they rocked your socks off live, and in an effort to reproduce that sound, Dressy Bessy have steadily turned up the distortion and volume on their guitar amps.

When it came out, Sound Go Round was hailed as a taste of the live Dressy Bessy that could be cute and rock out too, as opposed to the Dressy Bessy that held sockhops in the living room every Saturday night. Listening to songs like “That’s Why,” that album’s first single, alongside newer tracks like “Girl, You Shout!” show how much further Dressy Bessy have come since that album.

Just as energetic as much of the best material on Sound Go Round, “Girl, You Shout!” throws away most of the keyboards and other instrumentation in favour of a straightforward guitar-bass-drums attack. It’s still pop confectionary, but it’s the closest yet Dressy Bessy have come to blowing the doors off. The question, of course, is what the band will do for its next album, which they’re currently writing songs for.

How odd that the last member of the Smashing Pumpkins to make any significant impact on the music world was also the last member to join the group; Melissa Auf Der Maur is making cash money pretending she’s a stoned-out rock goddess. In the meantime, Billy Corgan has his own weblog (awwww), D’arcy has disappeared off the face of the planet and Jimmy Chamberlain is presumably still waiting for his last paycheck from Zwan. But let’s not forget the person one reviewer, somewhere, may have once called the second shining light of the Smashing Pumpkins, if only for a very brief period of time: James Iha.

I think somewhere in the mass of reviews given to the post-Mellon Collie box set The Aeroplane Flies High, there might be one that noticed the number of Iha contributions that never made it to the album. And by golly, some of them were pretty good, too! The duet he sang with Nina Gordon on the Bullet With Butterfly Wings single beats out half the covers Virgin added to the box set version, and “The Boy” is a slick little gem of a throwaway pop song, complete with synth washes and some upright drums propelling the whole thing forward. And then there’s Iha, whose breathy voice must’ve instilled a sort of warm, cuddly feeling in a teenage alterna-rock girl somewhere.

Why can I make this claim? Because obviously someone thought it’d be a good idea to tell him how great he was, and why did Billy always have to ruin everything by being the band despot anyways, and how about you put out your own album? So he did—Let It Come Down—and everyone suddenly realized that hey, maybe James Iha can’t write an entire album of songs like “The Boy,” or songs even close to it. Actually, the album dissolved upon contact with the atmosphere, leaving a misty haze of balladry and love letters. Needless to say, no one ever bought the album.

Except me. And this is why you should never trust any music recommendations I make: because I bought an album by James Iha.

This brother-sister duo has been getting a lot of press lately, and although no one can quite pin down what kind of music they play, the consensus is that it’s pretty damned good. This summer seems to be a pretty good for complex pop songs; first Charlotte Hatherley twists hooks and bends melodies to her iron will, and then the Fiery Furnaces go and make Frankenstein creations built out of a mish-mash of choruses and verses, apparently ripped out of the corpses of related-but-distinct songs.

Stereolab did this sort of thing occasionally on their last few albums, and the distinct parts always seemed as much like seperate songs as movements. On Blueberry Boat, though, the duo act like harried cooks in the kitchen, tossing things into the pot with wild abandon and checking occasionally to make sure it tastes good. And the amazing thing is the songs still manage to be catchy, despite all the twists and turns. A success in the kitchen! Five spoons.

Much like Operation Makeout and a thousand other bands out there, the Smugglers tour relentlessly and play in dives all over the continent, bringing the gospel of punk to all comers. What makes these guys different from most are the tour diaries on their website. Marvel as the band takes in a Joan Jett concert after a show in New York! Gasp at all the UVic grads having sex at the end-of-year bash the band played! Read in horror how one member totally fucked up an episode of TSN’s Off The Record! Run in terror as Danko Jones comes to reclaim the pants the band stole from him four years previous!

Playing the role of mercenary singer on this track is none other than indie pop megalomaniac Rose Melberg, she of the Tiger Trap / Go Sailor / Softies triumverate. They’re a big damned punk band; she’s a twee-pop singer from the wrong side of town. The result: pop-punk heaven all around.