Checking the Rearview Mirror

Our millennium is hurtling toward a wall, and we’re strapped in for the ride.

If this thought makes you nervous, avert your eyes and look back to where you once belonged.

Yes, recapitulation is going to be a popular pastime in the coming months. So think of this midyear backward glance at my favorite Orange County pop recordings of ’97 as a little tippy-toe step, a way to get acclimated before that unavoidable plunge in the 20th century’s receding tide. Try calming your end-of-an-era anxieties with this thought: Your record collection won’t be a record collection come the year 2001 but a relic from a bygone age. The soon-to-be-ancient artifacts noted below are well worth preserving.

While Orange County rock has turned into something of a big business lately, only one of these selections, the Offspring, is on a major label. Most are on the tiniest of independents--and Missiles of October, my favorite so far in 1997, has no record deal.

Thanks to the Offspring for this article’s opening image. It’s from “I Choose,” an ideal song to sing on our merry way to the end of the millennium. As we fly around the final curve, let’s hope that wall coming into view turns into an open door.

1. Missiles of October, “Tropic of Soulfolk” (no label). This veteran band from Laguna Beach offers the best of two worlds--the funk and fire of a talented, R&B-leaning; rock band, with melodic gifts and emotional acuity that meet the finest standards of the singer-songwriter tradition.

2. Bill Ward, “When the Bough Breaks” (Pyramid/Cleopatra). Here’s life for you: Ozzy Osbourne stays cartoonish and plays huge venues; Ward, who played drums behind Osbourne in Black Sabbath, emerges as the truer artist but struggles to ignite his solo career in small clubs (including a show Thursday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana). Ward’s first release in seven years is full of moving insights drawn from hard experience, and he has enlisted a terrific, versatile band to bring his adventurous, now-powerful/now-tender Cream-meets-Who approach to life.

3. Kerry Getz, “Apollo” (World in Motion). When Getz is at her best, she is virtually perfect in her ability to render deep feelings with advanced all-around artistry. And what’s merely average for this experienced fixture of the local coffeehouses would be pretty good for many another folk-pop singer-songwriter, including some of the heroines of the Lilith Fair.

4. The Offspring, “Ixnay on the Hombre” (Columbia). If I had to keep ‘em separated, I’d choose “Ixnay” over the Offspring’s career-making “Smash.” A neat job of keeping alive their formative punk spirit while forging ahead as an unrelentingly catchy, confidently crunchy, all-purpose hard-rock hit machine.

5. Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys, “Feelin’ Kinda Lucky” (Hightone). Their Western swing is a stylistic throwback, but their good humor, savvy song craft and immense vocal and instrumental talents bring freshness and immediacy to everything they play.

6. One Hit Wonder, “Outfall” (Nitro). One Hit Wonder in full flight is a zooming wonder indeed. The band’s first full-length studio CD emphasizes the punk-rock zoom but doesn’t stint on the pop catchiness that’s the band’s other hallmark. Clever, substantive lyrics emphasize humor in the face of adversity.

7. The Chantays, “Waiting for the Tide” (Rocktopia). One of O.C.’s most venerable rock bands still plays with grace and power, and the compositional gift that enabled the Chantays to come up with the surf-rock classic “Pipeline” hasn’t deserted them 34 years on.

8. Lutefisk, “Burn in Hell [Expletive]” (Bong Load). This L.A./O.C. band treats pop tunes the way General Motors treats crash-test dummies. Its dented, fractured, raucous but insistently melodic approach shows that a sturdy enough song can take a licking and keep on ticking.

9. Walter Clevenger, “The Man With the X-Ray Eyes” (Permanent Press). Clevenger’s vision is simple enough: Blend the tunefulness of the Beatles with the twang of rockabilly and country. Sounding like such similarly minded forebears as Nick Lowe and Marshall Crenshaw, he succeeds with 20-20 acuity on this do-it-yourself, one-man-band production.

10. Film Star, “Film Star” (Super Cottonmouth). A nice weave of elements, including spooky, swirly, Doors-like piano and organ and densely rocking guitars a la Neil Young. The Costa Mesa band’s debut unspools as an engagingly moody film noir.