If you’re going to wear your influences on your sleeve, you’d better choose wisely.

With Frosting on the Beater, The Posies combined the Big Star melody + harmony template (albeit not quite with lead vocals up in the range of some of Alex Chilton’s snarlier 70s work) with early 90s grunge, in the process creating a pop-grunge mood: heavy guitars, with sunny harmonies. The Posies weren’t merely content to pay tribute to their heroes on their own albums, though - at about this time, a marriage was made in melodic heaven when Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow of The Posies started performing as Big Star with Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens from that band’s original lineup.

I had almost zero interest in The Posies before Frosting on the Beater and I’ve had very little interest since. It was just a perfect storm of Big Star reverence at the perfect time. That said, tracks like “Dream All Day” and “Flavor of the Month” still sound just fine today. Not so sure about that 90s look, though.