In the years that followed the dissolution of the Marvelous 3, a 1990s one-hit wonder power-pop trio fronted by Butch Walker, Butch would often remark that his band was “15 years too late and five years too early.” After all, Walker and his bandmates—bassist Jayce Fincher and a drummer who was only ever known as “Slug” in the album liner notes (his real name is Doug Mitchell)—didn’t really fit in with the broody nineties crowd. There’s not a single iota of grunge in any of the three records Walker and the rest of the Marvelous 3 ever produced, nor is there anything akin to the boy-band/pop-princess radio fodder that was poised to take over the world as the decade and the millennium ground to a close. Instead, the guys in the Marvelous 3 were disciples of eighties hair metal and trashy pop-rock songs, with a fair amount of classic glam and singer/songwriter mentality thrown in for good measure. Those influences probably meant the band was straight fucked from the moment they signed with Elektra Records, a label that became known for screwing over similarly-minded pop-rock acts (Third Eye Blind and Nada Surf, for example) before they ran out of money and went bust in the face of the Napster revolution. But for a few years at least, the Marvelous 3 got to act like rock stars, and in the process, they produced three of the finest power pop records of the past 20 years. 1997’s Math and Other Problems was the first.