My Top 1000 Songs #213: Get Over You

Between my later high school years and my arrival at college (and particularly the college radio station), I spent much of my musical life looking back at the punk and indie bands that had escaped my tutelage under the Midwestern radio stations I'd grown up with. And few discoveries thrilled me more than stumbling across the first two Undertones albums. While bands like the Ramones and Buzzococks had established that pop hooks were an integral part of early punk rock, Ireland's Undertones upped the pop quotient. Their songs took the girls, cars, and teenage exuberance of 60s bands like the Beach Boys and the Turtles and gave them a little more juice. Killer hooks and Feargal Sharkey's distinctive vibrato paired up to deliver endless smiles.

It's almost ridiculous trying to settle on a particular track from those records to include in this spot, but "Get Over You," with those call-and-response vocals and rollicking drums in the chorus, probably best encapsulates the unadulterated joy I felt upon discovering this band.

And live:

As performed last year by the current iteration of the (Sharkey-less but still great) band: