Mo Troper - Dilettante (2021)

Dilettante (n.): a person with an amateur interest in the arts;
an album of postcard-length power pop songs. See also: Mo Troper IV.

Shortly after their “bigger than Jesus” remarks rocked the United States, The Beatles released Revolver. They never toured again after that, maintaining a credibility and untouchability that gets reissued and remastered every three years. Mo Troper, after releasing his full-length cover of Revolver, announced and abruptly cancelled a tour because something much bigger than Jesus was rocking the planet. You’d hope it was Mo himself. It wasn’t, but Mo’s rocking, anyway.

Dilettante—also known as Mo Troper IV—combines decades of power-pop worship, scholarship, and penmanship into a 28-track collection of sprints. The playlist-as-album pundits might call it a data dump, but Mo brands it as a relaxed way to finish song sketches in unprecedented times. IV is a work that some of his friends call a musical, but this claim remains unverified. If there’s anybody aching to spin up a limiter-drenched production centered around scrolling a cluttered inbox for serotonin, prototype theme songs for public access shows plugged into the scene, and gasp-long dips into math rock, 1990s video game cheese, and medieval revelry, get in touch. (You might have to cut Mo’s rejected jingle for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, even though the stage needs to hear it.)

For those less dramatically inclined, there’s plenty here to pick up the slack. Mo gushes about “The Perfect Song” with syrupy, undeniably guitar pop that’s a remarkable stand-in for the gold he describes. False showtune “Sugar and Cream” goes medium about the wizardry found in a cup of coffee. Clipped moments like the sub-minute love song “Skyscraper Sized Bong” are as ephemeral as they are effective, shoving callouts to Big Star and Teenage Fanclub into pocket- sized arrangements.

“I think that's the thing about this album - I don't even really care about touring or making vinyl anymore, I'm generally pretty sick of the PR rigmarole, I just want to release as much stuff as I can before I'm dead,” Troper explains. Call it information overload or a heaping of odds and ends, but Dilettante finds Mo Troper at his most sincere, present, and challenged. It doesn’t take fifty million screaming fans to prove him right.