Nearly 35 years after I'm on Fire, Dwight Twilley hasn't stopped writing and recording great pop tunes, and if he doesn't seem especially concerned with keeping up with the times, that's not to say his music hasn't been evolving. 2010's Green Blimp is as tuneful and carefully crafted as any of Twilley's classic albums of the '70s and '80s, but he's cautiously moved on from the Beatlesque power pop sound of his best-known work; full of keyboards, strings, big distorted guitars, accordions, Latin percussion, and other musical seasonings, the scale of Green Blimp suggests some harder-rocking variant on the classic bigger-is-better production styles of Phil Spector or Brian Wilson, though Twilley's melodic structures still sound quite familiar to a longtime listener. At the same time, the boomy drum sounds and the synthesizer patches suggest this was recorded at a studio that was state of the art in 1985; Twilley is still a guy fascinated with rock & roll's past, but on Green Blimp he seems to be doing a balancing act between two ears separated by 20 years. The really unusual part, though, is that Twilley actually pulls this off; instead of pulling at one another, the divergent influences of Green Blimp cohere into something that connects strongly with Twilley's elemental pop songcraft, and his vocals are excellent, full-bodied and bold on rockers like Get Up and Doctor, and full of nuance on slower, more atmospheric numbers like Let It Rain and the psychedelic title track. And if not every tune here is on a par with I'm on Fire or Girls, cue up Stop, Speed of Light, and It Ends and you'll know right away this man's creative well is a long way from dried out. There's no telling how Twilley came up with the formula for Green Blimp, but as long as he can keep making albums this good, he's advised to keep mixing his eras to his heart's content. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

1		Get Up
2		Speed of Light
3		Me and Melanie
4		Let It Rain
5		Doctor
6		Green Blimp
7		You Were Always There
8		It's Never Coming Back
9		Stop
10		Ten Times
11		Witches in the Sky
12		It Ends