Blackpool Lights

Blackpool Lights frontman Jim Suptic tends toward understatement. Upon the release of the Kansas City band’s debut album, This Town’s Disaster (June 20 on Suptic’s own Curb Appeal Records), he says: “This is just sincere, unpretentious rock music. We’re a bunch of guys from the middle of America who love rock ‘n’ roll. We don’t have a gimmick; what you see is what you get.”

But the level of craft and passion underlining these 11 songs suggests there’s more to Blackpool Lights than Suptic lets on. He’s candid, for instance, about the band’s birth, after the death of his previous outfit, the Get Up Kids. “I took a few months to clear my head and figure out what I was going to do,” he confides. “I’m an art school dropout, and I was thinking of going back to school. But I had these songs, and I thought, if I don’t give these songs a shot, I’ll regret it the rest of my life. I’ve got to do this.”

“This,” of course, was finding a new band, now comprised of Suptic (vocals, guitar), guitarist-singer Chris Clark, bassist Brian Everad and drummer Billy Brimblecom. “Blackpool Lights started as a bunch of people who’d just quit other bands and wanted to do something fresh and exciting,” Suptic explains. “We’re all very focused and we agreed, if we’re going to do this, let’s do it right; let’s really give it our all.”

Their all is an album’s-worth of perfect-power-pop nuggets like first single “Blue Skies,” which propels itself out of the speakers with a descending guitar riff that pays off big time in the sing-along chorus: “I’m watching these blue skies turn to grey/ And all these friendships fade away/ These clouded memories are seen through bloodshot eyes/ I’m watching these blue skies turn to grey.”

“It’s about how people grow up and change,” Suptic says. “Your friends go in different directions, and no matter how close you’ve been, you all move on. You have to enjoy the good times while they last because they’re gone in a second.”

Much of the material on This Town’s Disaster was written when the songwriter himself was in a transitional period. “With a lot of these songs, everything’s screwed up, but then there’s an uplifting part; the person in the song starts out confused but ends up figuring things out. The songs aren’t all about me, but I was in that head space when I wrote a lot of them. The Get Up Kids were ending and I was trying to find my new path. When you’ve been in a band for 10 years, it’s all you know, and then it’s over and you’re left wondering, what the hell do I do now? You’re starting over and you have issues and regrets to work out, but you do have those great memories, too.”