Get Your Power-Pop Fix with Some Exclusive New Tight Pants Syndrome Tunes

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Every so often, I receive an email from Brian McClelland, of Tight Pants Syndrome, Maxtone 4, etc. fame. These missives are always chock full of information about what his bands are up to -- and contain free music. Unsurprisingly, these are some of my favorite emails to receive. This week, McClelland is chock full of information about a few upcoming shows/happenings:

*Hotel Faux Pas, a '90s band for which he played bass and contributed backing vocals, is doing a reunion show on Friday night at Cicero's. Opening is another band that recently reunited, The Boorays, and Helliphino. McClelland describes HFP as "a folkier offshoot of the first dork rock wave that swept through St. Louis around They Might Be Giants' early STL campaigns, playing banter-heavy and extremely silly folky power pop rock stuff at EXTREME volumes" and points to this 1999 RFT write-up for more information. At the Cicero's show, the band will be giving away its backlog of CDs and cassettes.

Tight Pants Syndrome is still on track to release a new album, Fully Attractive, in late May or early June. It has seventeen(!) songs and a cover of Wings' "Jet." "What delayed this one so long is that we basically had a ten song record ready to go last summer, and suddenly Tom Stephens went and wrote a bunch of new tunes that were too good to leave out," McClelland says. "So we went back into Alpha Omega with Daniel Williams) for backing tracks again and *boom* -- now we have a whole mess of new rock for you." The band is taking a break until May, because drummer Scott Hermes has apparently retired from music, McClelland adds. He also sends along two killer new songs, which are glorious slices of Sloan-esque power-pop ("Dawn") and early '80s female-fronted hard rock ("Telephone"), respectively.

MP3: Tight Pants Syndrome, "Dawn"

MP3: Tight Pants Syndrome, "Telephone"