The Scooters

The Scooters

I Can See Your House From Here (Aeronaut) Hmmmm ... tight harmonies, memorable melodies, delicious slips between major and minor chord patterns, lush, yet spritely arrangements ... It's all too confusing. This is pop, damn it, but not exactly the pop of today. There are elements of Badfinger 2002, or Squeeze Jr., here, a handful of Hollies and Raspberries. It's pop, but not in that indie, "write your thesis about varying grades of shoe leather" way. In fact, the Scooters are so pop, so accessible, that it'd be easy to lump them in with that burgeoning radio-safe smarter than your average teen-pop pile. Yet to equate these clean-cut Welsh laddies with the likes of Coldplay, Train, or Travis is too broad a stroke. The Scooters aren't headed for the Grammys anytime soon, sadly, especially not with playful and snarky lyrics like the ones in "Tranny Song": "He knows that everybody's going to be doing it soon, blasting 'Mamma Mia' in the living room ... He's been watching Doris Day again ... ." Were it not for that attitude, it'd be tempting to say that the shiny, happy Scooters have more in common with, say, Radiohead, but that's just too weird. These guys aren't going to lock themselves in a castle to record anytime soon, either. The Scooters are just pure pop -- plain and simple, elegant and catchy. And sometimes that's just enough. (Saturday, March 16, District Bar & Grill, 11pm)