As big-label debuts go, few looked as promising as the power-pop band Velvet Crush's 1994 album Teenage Symphonies To God. The feel was right, the cover was cool, and the title tipped its hat to Brian Wilson. But Symphonies was all about promise and very little about fulfillment, the sort of album where the ideas and instincts seem so right that you keep wishing the music itself were better than it actually is. It made it hard not to look forward to a better follow-up, but after Symphonies, Velvet Crush seemed to disappear, resurfacing in 1998 with the barely heard Heavy Changes. The band's bid to escape obscurity should receive major support from the new Free Expression, however, a gorgeous gem of a pop record. Co-produced by pal Matthew Sweet, who also worked on Velvet Crush's 1991 debut, Free Expression is an assured, enjoyable album without a bad song on it. Maybe it's because they come from a place without deeply entrenched scenes, but one thing about acts from outside major metropolitan areas—including The Meat Puppets, Built To Spill, and Sweet himself—is that they tend to be less respectful of the distinctions of genre, and a little more likely to take inspiration from styles of music that have fallen out of fashion. From Illinois by way of Rhode Island, Velvet Crush, like Sweet, draws considerably from the pop end of the classic-rock spectrum without embarrassment, and it's refreshing to hear; "Heaven Knows," for instance, sounds just as influenced by Tom Petty as by The Byrds. But no one's stamp is as distinct on Free Expression as that of Sweet, who in Velvet Crush seems to have found colleagues who are as committed as he is to creating melancholy pop with a mature sensibility, be it in the tender ballad "Things Get Better" or the rousing "Kill Me Now." In a year already flush with masterful, uncompromising pop albums of varying degrees of eccentricity (Built To Spill, Elf Power, The Merrymakers, Fountains Of Wayne, The Flaming Lips), here's another one, and not a moment too soon.