The A-Sides: Power-Pop Gets Positively Cheerful

The A-Sides.

Shawn Brackbill

Expansive and poppy, The A-Sides' music is positively cheerful, with a blend of silliness and sincerity that's helped make the band a rising star. The A-Sides' 2005 album Hello Hello received attention well beyond the band's hometown of Philadelphia, and its new second album, Silver Storms, should reach an even wider audience.

According to The A-Sides, the band's members wrote the songs and music "outside of movie theaters and on grandparents' farms, in libraries and public parks, in basements and on beaches" over a period of two years, during which time their lives were filled in with bits and pieces of what the album would become. The new disc deviates from the Beach Boys-esque, '60s-style pop of Hello Hello, but not too far: Sunny power-pop remains the order of the day.