Philadelphia can be a rough town. Being a lifelong Philly sports fan, I have vivid memories of Hall-of-Famer third baseman Mike Schmidt hitting one of his many home runs in a game, only to strike out his next at-bat and be mercilessly booed by the hard-ass Phillies fans. The Eagles fans are no better--drunken brawls often break out amongst themselves at games in Veterans Stadium. The 1970’s Flyers, known as the Broad Street Bullies, are infamous for upping the ante on violence in hockey.

It’s a town that David Lynch based his claustrophobic epic Eraserhead on. Yet, it’s also where a brief rock/new wave renaissance took place in the 80’s, with bands like the Hooters, Robert Hazard and the Heroes, the Dead Milkmen, the A’s, Tommy Conwell and His Young Rumblers, John Eddie and the Front Street Runners and Beru Revue either crashing the Top 40 or making a minor splash in new-wave circles, back when “alternative” really meant alternative. Before then, it was Hall and Oates, who made it big three years after the fact with “Sara Smile” and immediately left for New York. The only constant? Big hair. Even the Dead Milkmen had big hair, albeit not the finely-coifed new-wave ‘do’s of Daryl Hall and Robert Hazard.

After that? Not much, which is why Marah comes as such a pleasant surprise all these years later with their second album, Kids in Philly. Rather than falling into lockstep with whatever current trend, Marah feels more like a band that does what it pleases and draws on all kinds of sources. No one’s going to look back on them 15 years from now and date their music like a pastel blazer or pair of wrap-around shades.

By the same token, they’re not doing anything shockingly avant-garde, which is no crime. The album’s first single, “Point Breeze,” sounds like an outtake from the recent Springsteen "Tracks" box set, recalling that ambling soul sound he got on his first two albums. Lead singer Dave Bielanko is clearly a huge Bruce fan, which sometimes hinders his vocals with the same melodrama and over-statement Springsteen occasionally suffers from.

Now that I’m done throwing batteries at Marah from the bleacher seats, allow me to say "Kids in Philly" is a damn good album. The band draws from dozens of influences. “My Heart Is the Bums on the Street” has the jazzy sway of a Tom Waits song, while “Barstool Boys” recalls the British folk/rock hybrid the Faces nailed on their last album, "Ooh La La." You’re just as likely to hear a banjo in the mix as a saxophone, and neither used as it’s supposed to be.

The song of the album for me is “Round Eye Blues,” wherein a Vietnam Vet reaches a later period in life where the flashbacks simply become bad memories, and he ties them in with images and sounds from the pop music of his youth. It’s interesting in the context of Vietnam Vets today in that as a group in society and the media, they’ve fallen completely off the map after a mid-80’s reappraisal thanks to movies like Platoon, novels like In Country and albums like "Born in the USA."

I’d imagine now they feel comfortable enough to head down to the local VFW and talk about their past. But back in the 1970’s, before that delayed recognition of their plight (which was invisibility and a vague sense of shame inflicted by both The Powers That Be for “losing,” and the more anti-war members of their generation), they were filled with serious resentment in a number of directions for their country. “Round Eye Blues” is the sound of a middle-aged man coming to as much peace as he will with his bad memories, recalling his abject fear (“I was shaking like Little Richard/I was waiting like old James Brown”) and the haunted images he can’t forget (“Late at night I still hear the cries/Of three black guys I seen taking the face”). The difference now is that, as with many things in the past, they all become one (your life) and a bad memory is just as meaningful as a good one. Thus, this all plays out against a melody that borrows the drum line from “Be My Baby” and lyrics that recall a handful of 60’s soul classics.

That’s a neat little number for Bielanko, a guy in his mid-20’s, to pull off. It shows an understanding of not just how memories work in the context of pop music, but how they relate to the larger picture of one’s life. And, I hate to say it, these days, as far as the music business is concerned, it’s a bullshit move that won’t sell any records or win over young fans who often can’t even trace their favorite artists’ influences past 1990.

Don’t get me wrong--I love what Marah’s doing here and the direction they’re going. But I know they’re pissing in the wind and will have a hard time simply surviving. I’m not even going to blame the music business on this one. It just seems like we’re reaching a point in pop music culture where anything that isn’t completely disposable or kissing the ass of some passing trend is viewed as weird or derivative. It’s the fans -- via hard-core teen-target marketing, they’re being sold the idea that the past is a load of bullshit, and if their parents liked something, it must be bad. A band like Marah understands what was good from the past and uses it in a way that suggest these sounds and ideas are just as valid an anything else out there. We’re being trained to disregard the past, or ironically focus on the more cheesy aspects of it, when it’s necessary to understand all of it for the future. I think that’s one of the many reasons why popular music has become so polarized over the past decade, with very little middle ground between what kids think is rebellious and pop fluff.

Unfortunately, one of the best examples of Marah retooling the past isn’t on the album, but on the CD single for “Point Breeze,” where the band takes Springsteen’s somber “Streets of Philadelphia” and gives it a lively bluegrass overhaul. It’s certainly not done as a joke, sounds completely authentic and forfeits none of the song’s meaning. (Springsteen himself often benefits from speeding up his ballads. I have a bootleg of an early rockabilly version of “My Hometown” that puts the final, slowed-down version to shame.) It’s that sense of adventure and willingness to experiment with influences that makes "Kids in Philly" a far more interesting album than much of what is going on out there. And it also guarantees the band a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding on the level of, say, the Hooters, in the mid-80’s. Consider "Kids in Philly" to be like the first Rocky--they beat the champ but lost on points because that’s how it is. They’ll go back to their mousy pet-shop girlfriend, give her a good ride, change the newspaper in the bird cage and think about the next fight.