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July 3, 2002, 8:45 a.m. Five CDs You Need Power pop is the soundtrack of summer. By Michael Long

ummer music ought to glisten like headlights on wet pavement. The arrangements have to be tight, bright, and trebly, with lots of cymbals, electric guitars tuned to bubblegum jangle, harmonies crisp as cracked ice, maniacally happy bass lines, and lyrics a whole lot more sincere than cynical.

This summer-music prescription turns out to also be the definition of "power pop" — the music of early Beatles, Tom Petty, Marshall Crenshaw, the Byrds, Buddy Holly in the 1950s and the occasional Weezer single in the 2000s. Power pop means three-minute radio classics that are every generation's soundtrack to summer days and nights.

The best new power pop is often both lyrically and musically straightforward — and fun — as the old stuff. Today's rulers of radio playlists, performers such as Backstreet Boys, Jay-Z, and Linkin Park, are only posturing various parts of adolescent attitude. Their music won't last. But power pop will always stick around because it is a celebration of the entire experience of youth. There will always be a place for that with young people who are living it, and those of us who are older but still like to remember it.

The radio hasn't played what you like in years. Here's where the good music went. Herewith, five summer CDs of pure power pop that every self-respecting, music-buying, convertible-ownership-dreaming NRO reader should be playing this summer:

5.The Voice of Tony Burrows: Bubblegum Classics. Burrows was the voice behind no less than five different monstrous AM hits under five different made-up names. He sang "Love Grows (Where my Rosemary Goes)" as Edison Lighthouse; "Beach Baby" as frontman for the studio-only First Class; "My Baby Loves Lovin'" and "United We Stand" among others, and filled in the rest of his rather anonymous career with enough sugary-sweet bubblegum pop to keep a nation of dentists in boat payments for half the 1970s. Not everything here is well known, and much is hardly worth listening to (the novelty "Too Many Golden Oldies" proves in an instant why it was "previously unreleased in the U.S."), but with Burrows's "Oh yeah, I know him!" voice and these dastardly infectious pop hooks, the overall pleasure is undeniable.

4. Swag — Catch-All. When drummer Ken Coomer left alternative-alt-country-pop-techno-whaa? band Wilco, he hooked up with members of Cheap Trick, Sixpence None the Richer, and Mavericks to make a record just for fun. The result was this set of a dozen tunes that fairly radiates sunshine through the shrinkwrap. Tunes like "Lone" and "Different Girl" deftly cop Beatle-esque arrangement and production to become instant favorites that would have been as perfect on the radio in 1968 as they were when this was released in 2001 to outsell the entire catalog of Elvis and the Beatles and become a radio staple. Okay, not really. But those who hear this disc will revel in it — and will gain further evidence that radio programmers have all the open-mindedness of a Nation reader at a Baptist tent revival.

3. Ben Folds Five--Ben Folds Five. Okay, it's not by-the-book power pop. So sue me. The much-missed Ben Folds Five crafted so many little pop masterpieces heard by too few people that it is hard to know where to begin praising their work, so I'm starting with their first major-label release. The instrumentation is just drum kit, a fuzzed-up electric bass and roadhouse piano, but put the put-together sound was utterly new: the best part of the punk spirit (even though there wasn't much "best" in the first place) infused with true musical sensibility. In the mid-1990s, Ben Folds put his well-tuned musical ear and goofy sense of humor in the service of bringing melody, harmony and fun to a pop-music world still governed by depressives like Nine Inch Nails and the shallowest acolytes of Seattle grunge. Every cut is a standout: "Jackson Cannery" kicks things off with a jazzy piano over galloping drums; "Philosophy" hangs just that off a metaphor about a skyscraper (and the song feels especially poignant since 9/11), and caps off a high-speed jam by quoting George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue"; and "Boxing" is a touching, utterly sincere conversation imagined between Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell (really). And don't miss "Where's Summer B.?" whose lyrics have nothing to do with the season, yet perfectly capture its every emotion--this is possibly the best summer tune on any of these five records.

2. Bill Lloyd--Set to Pop. For my money, the reigning solo king of power pop is Nashville's Bill Lloyd. An indie rocker who is also a successful country and pop songwriter for mainstream radio, Lloyd was half of the groundbreaking "cowpunk" duo Foster & Lloyd in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This 1994 solo outing (somewhat easier to find than his db Records debut "<a href="http://www.billlloydmusic.com/billforsale.html">Feeling the Elephant</a>" which is also a treat) sounds like someone who loves power pop making it radio-ready and "jangly" as possible. Cuts such as "I Went Electric" and a cover of the Kinks's "This Is Where I Belong" feature bright guitars and brassy percussion. It's music for taking the top down and driving anywhere as fast as the car can go.

1. Fountains of Wayne — Utopia Parkway. Tom Hanks chose Fountains of Wayne's tune "That Thing You Do" as the theme for his 1996 movie of the same name. It was the break the band needed to get their peerless power pop heard and with this, their second album, the quartet turned out a virtual textbook of timeless teenage pleasures across inescapably sweet hooks. The lyrics are completely without guile and irony; for instance, "Prom Theme" captures at once the over-dramatic expressions of high-school seniors while still respecting the feelings behind them: "And soon we'll say goodbye / Then we'll work until we die / But tonight we feel like stars / We'll play our air guitars 'cause we're eighteen / It's a perfect night to sing our prom theme." Rolling Stone's Greg Kot wrote that the band is "celebrating and satirizing the rituals of youth," but I dare you to find even a hint of satire here. When songwriters Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger are dreamily "falling in love with the senator's daughter," or mustering courage for a tattoo by bringing along "a 38 Special CD collection" and "some Bactine to prevent infection," anybody in the range of your speakers will, for a moment, feel like he's 18 and grinning in the 1970s. "It must be summer," they sing — and even when it's not, these guitars and time-tight harmonies ring so true that the mood makes it so anyway.

— Michael Long is a director of the White House Writers Group.