Promise

If you're continuously searching the margins for lost artifacts of the pop pantheon, you can find your daily dose in late period exponents of pure, lean, Beatlesque power pop band Promise. Originally issued in 1980 on the Boulder, Colorado, area band's own Cumulus label, their eponymous debut is filled with melodic, beatific blasts of pure pop, replete with ringing, jangly guitars and rollicking crunch. Co-led by singer-songwriters and guitarists Curt Mangan and Danny Mey - with aid provided by the just-right rhythms of bassist Randy Jones and drummer Gary York - the group created an album with precious little allying it to the punk-inspired power pop or prescient new wave of the time, instead choosing to hone in on a classicist pop sound highly indebted to those famous moptops from Liverpool. Abetted by the fact that some of the group's members had been playing together since their teenage combos of the mid '60s, the album carries an out-of-time flair across surging rockers and mournful balladry. Got Kinda Lost Records is ecstatic to give this benchmark of privately pressed power pop another chance to shine with this first ever reissue. Includes exhaustive liner notes by Jeremy Cargill (Ugly Things Magazine) culled from interviews with Mangan and Mey. RIYL: Badfinger, Big Star, early Cheap Trick, Emitt Rhodes, the Raspberries, Liverpool Echo, the Scruffs, Shoes, Dwight Twilley Band, etc.