Rock Eupora Gets Personal at The East Room

If you’re a fan of power pop, you likely appreciate it as a precisely judged balancing act with extra guitars. Taking their cues from The Beatles and The Who, power poppers as stylistically divergent as Shoes, Game Theory and the unavoidable Big Star have made music that is both heavy and light, as well as profound and ephemeral. Riffs that toy with time signatures matter in power pop, but it’s also a music that folds in the preoccupations of young singers who sometimes find life all too overwhelming. On Saturday at The East Room, Rock Eupora’s singer, songwriter and guitarist Clayton Waller, stood up and proved that he’s a master of the form, from conjuring up super-catchy guitar riffs to delivering vocals that are simultaneously emotionally charged and offhand.

The show kicked off with a set from Angela’s Headache, a shape-shifting and contemplative pop ’n’ rock project lead by Angela Wooten, who you might have heard with Nashville bands like Bandit and Secret Club. Following Wooten & Co. was rock outfit The Prescriptions, whose most recent full-length is 2019’s Hollywood Gold, a psych-rock record that takes cues from genre-busting bands like My Morning Jacket. The Prescriptions have recently been on the road with Rock Eupora in the run up to the release of Pick at the Scab, Rock Eupora’s fourth LP overall and first for Alabama indie Single Lock Records. The East Room concert concluded a slew of events marking the album’s release.

When Rock Eupora took its turn on the stage, Waller told the audience about writing the new album: “I was off the road, alone with my thoughts and alone with God.” Indeed, the sheer level of craft that Pick at the Scab evinces makes Waller’s commitment to the job of creating interesting music very clear. The new album is about not knowing how to navigate life, and the possibility that — as The Kinks famously bemoaned way back in the 1960s — the good times have flown, or maybe were never there to begin with.

Waller was born and raised in Mississippi, and he moved to Nashville to study at Belmont University, graduating from the school’s MBA program in 2015. He recorded Pick at the Scab mostly by himself, a process familiar to fans of obsessive power-pop artists like Todd Rundgren. Waller’s approach lends the album a pleasing consistency of tone. Listen to the album — its mid-fi recording techniques give it the kind of slightly retro aura that you might associate with power pop, and Waller’s lyrics are first-rate. However, the record’s virtues were magnified by Waller playing the entire album front-to-back with a crack band. 

On songs like “Intimacy,” which is the most immediately appealing slice of classic power pop on Pick at the Scab, Waller played rhythm guitar with no false steps. Second guitarist David Dreas added single-note figures and additional rhythm moves, while bassist Matt Wyman and drummer Dan Crotts kept the music moving. On “I Will Never Be Happy,” Waller played solo, and the vulnerability of his vocal performance put me in mind of Neil Young and Alex Chilton.

The band was beyond perfect — the songs sped up, slowed down and had, you know, dynamics. Waller’s songs stick measures of 2/4 into 4/4 structures, and this is also a band who knows how to play with time. Waller is a true composer, not just a songwriter, and his tunes satisfy as pieces of pure music, with the guitar figures evoking, say, Game Theory, while his melodies suggest he's listened to The Shins. In other words, Waller has a synoptic view of the field of power pop. The show consisted of 80 of the most impressive minutes of music I’ve seen in a while, and if Waller wrote his latest album alone with his thoughts and his beliefs, he’s translated the personal into something that has the potential to go worldwide.