Song of the Day 6/9: The Posies, “Solar Sister”

In popular memory, grunge is the rock genre that represents the ’90s, but that obscures the reality — the ’90s were rock’s last hurrah in large part because multiple genres still sold enough records (and there still were “records” to sell) to land recording contracts.

One genre that thrived was power pop — well, thrived relative to its normal state of neglect. Critics still slagged the music as backward-looking, but acts like Teenage Fanclub, Redd Kross and Matthew Sweet had enough fans, and influenced enough other bands, that International Pop Overthrow concerts were being held by the end of the decade. Of course, none of those acts sold many records — the existential irony of power pop is that it’s designed to be popular yet nobody buys it — but the period constitutes what might be the Silver Age of Power Pop.

The Posies, formed in Seattle in the late ’80s by Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer, were a major part of the scene once they released their “Frosting on the Beater” album in 1993. Critics mostly ignored the only Seattle band that didn’t trade in grunge, but that LP — and this song, from which the album title was taken — are among the high points of the decade for power pop lovers. Plus it’s the only song that namechecks Theodore Dreiser’s best-known novel.

The Posies broke up in the late ’90s after Stringfellow and Auer joined Alex Chilton in his rebooted Big Star, but they hooked up for an acoustic tour before retreating to a studio-only existence. An oft-cited highlight was an acoustic version of “Solar Sister.”