I'll go out on a limb here right away and state for the record that there has not been a better power pop guitar band than Watershed since the glory days of the Replacements.

They are not necessarily that good, they just try that hard. Funny thing is, they claim to have discovered the 'Mats and Husker Du late in life, and profess their one true love as Cheap Trick. The members of Watershed met in fourth grade and spent their formative years playing in their basement. Their first gig was at a local Subway sandwich shop in front of their high school classmates.

Fifteen years, several hundred shows, and an independently released album later, the band signed to Epic Records, and released their full length debut Twister this year. Twister is a composite of everything Watershed has done up to this point, with a number of older songs from their independent releases, as well as new songs written just before they were recorded. While I was taught by a music mentor years ago to use the "power pop" tag sparingly, if it doesn't apply to Watershed, it doesn't apply to anybody. Simple, exuberant pop songs with irresistible hooks, pumped up by lots of guitar and insistent drumming, overflow from the "shoulda been on vinyl" sound of Twister.

The bigger than life sounds of "You Need Me" open up the disc with a U2-like stadium rock feel, which quickly degenerates into a raucous "I Want You" anthem. In fact "anthemic" is a good way to describe much of the music on Twister, that life or death feeling that what they are singing about is the only thing that matters, as on the album's first single "How Do You Feel", which boasts an unbeatable singalong chorus riding a monster hook. At a time when so much about music is about marketing and where a band fits in, Watershed stand defiantly outside the hip categorization and play simple pop rock the way they want to.

To borrow a song title from Twister, "If That's How You Want It", this is the place to find it.

July 1995