This was the first time that a lot of younger fans, myself included, had heard of this defunct Memphis band called Big Star, and telling a teenage self-styled pop aficionado that a band he likes is channeling some earlier band is like telling him that he's been smoking candy cigarettes. We dutifully tracked down the genuine article.

What we realized when we got the music home and put it on was that we hadn't been listening to bands who were influenced by Big Star at all -- we'd been listening to bands who were brazenly ripping them off. It was like spending two years listening to Harry Connick Jr., then having somebody say, "Perhaps you should check out this Sinatra fellow." Present in the original were all the moves we loved -- the unapologetic hooks, the high harmonies, the chords big enough to live in -- but how was it that the melodies, though they felt perfect and inevitable once you'd gotten them implanted in your head, were impossible to predict? Pop kept dissolving into soul, or evolving into this sound that ached to be orchestral. The harmonies sounded heartbroken in a way that only gospel was supposed to sound.

Those knock-off bands were not to be faulted, really. However well-intentioned one's efforts, there is no faking Memphis. And beyond that, Big Star were a band's band, meaning they let their craft show. This makes their stuff unpalatable to a lot of people who come to it expecting the Beatles, since for all the songwriting brilliance of Chilton and Bell, you can also hear the cleverness, the musical references, the "Dudes, wouldn't it be strange if I put this note here?" It makes their influence tricky to handle, too. Think about Tom Waits, a musician's musician: Can you possibly be "influenced" by the man without imitating his thing, and doing an inferior job? Better, maybe, to find some other, humbler muse. Love Big Star if you must, but make your ambition to write like the Cars.

Such, roughly, were my thoughts before last month, when I heard a promo copy of "The Subversive Sounds of Love," the first album by a new Chicago pop quintet called Frisbie. But I don't think that way anymore. These people have somehow contrived to, in that evocative phrase, take this shit higher. They've made a record that, for all its proud and obvious borrowing from Big Star, is so tightly crafted and unusual that you could set it beside Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" and Wilco's "Summerteeth" as evidence that Chicago has been the real, if somewhat unheralded, capital of American guitar-pop for the past 10 years. These are records that pull off, over and over, the monstrously difficult balancing act involved in making great three-minute songs, managing to be lyrically and melodically innovative and a joy to listen to at the same time.

"The Subversive Sounds of Love" is sort of a cheesy title. But it makes a perverse sense once you get to know the record. One of the subversive things about Frisbie is that, like the twee cult songwriter Jonathan Richman, they're constantly daring you to call them cheesy. Just when you open your mouth to do so, they kick your ass. "Let's Get Started," the lead track on "Subversive," works that way. It starts with a shout, in chorus, of "LET'S GO!" and a throbbing major chord. For a second you think you might be trapped in the prom scene of a late-period John Hughes movie. Then the verse comes in:

Let's get started again,
Set the clocks at the same time
Let's get started again,
Let's all walk from the same line

You're grooving now. It's a good John Hughes movie. There's this unbelievably precise harmony note that just emerges, with no sliding, on top of the words "time" and "line," so you can be sure that at least one of these guys did some time in choir. The drums aren't doing that clicka-clicka thing that any song beginning with the line "LET'S GO!" should logically do -- instead it sounds like a military shuffle. Very cool. The second guitar is chiming in time: chime ... chime ... chime . . . chime. There's an organ that sounds like somebody found it on the street. Then the voice again:

Because it's easiest to believe
When ambiguities run more like some regime. Let's get started again
Set the clocks at the same time

Did he say, "When ambiguities run more like some regime?" Suddenly this has become a dark little song. Overtopping all those big fat Bs and Es and As and the shining notes, is the voice of somebody who's finally learned to love Big Brother, and he's here to tell you that it's all going to be fine. Relax.

Or maybe that's not what he's saying. Maybe he's saying, "Come on, we all know there are no absolutes. Let's proceed as if there were, so that we can get something done."

So when we want it to,
It'll be easy and fun
We'll be the only ones

I've listened to the song three dozen times and am still not sure which paraphrase to go with. But you don't have to decide, because the whole time you're feeling it, you're drumming with pencils, you're directing the video in your head. It's beautiful. This is Frisbie.

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