(PR) Four Eyes: Anthology 1977 1990 tells the tale in 22 songs- check the album for recording sessions with Greg Kihn, demos and an unreleased album for MCA, demos for CBS, and more. Its easy to see why all the interest - amongst the gems here are some of the most memorable melodies you're ever likely to hear. Spanning a decade, you get powerpop at it's best, with a heavy emphasis on the pop. You're gonna hear echoes of this and that - 20/20, Phil's Seymour and Spector, Elvis Costello, Squeeze, and the Beatles. It all means a dedication to song craft, as well as a guaranteed heartfelt performance. Some songs pound out their message, others sweetly inform.
Why this music hasn't reached a larger audience is beyond reason, but front man Mark DeCerbo continues to write and perform incredible pop material - witness his terrific Zip Records releases, Sweet on the Vine (2005) and Look See (2006) as well as more than a dozen compilation album appearances in the past decade.
In the meantime, in a career as lengthy as this, there's a lot of ground to cover. A cursory look would show us that Four Eyes themselves got their start in San Diego circa 1976 as a country boogie band, quickly mutating into a power pop group called Copenhagen. Before the end of the decade, the band became Four Eyes and thats where our album begins. They released a single, Penny Pong/Disengaged in 1980 and soon were drawing major label attention. They were courted by several majors over the decade, but ultimately no releases emerged. However, numerous tracks were recorded, leaving the incredible aural souvenirs comprising this collection. The band split in 1990.
In the ensuing years, front man DeCerbo has continued to perform and record. Amongst other highlights, in 1994 he taped an album, Babys Not in The Mood, for Bizarre/Straight , several of the songs showing up here in earlier versions. That same year he taped a new version of Four Eyes "Contagious" for a kitschy, but still kinda cool, ABC-TV Movie of the Week, Mike Hammer: Come Die With Me, even making a brief appearance during a bikini contest.