By Blake Maddux

A single listen to The Salt Collective’s album disabused me of my initial skepticism. The recording is as enjoyable and interesting as one would hope for from an effort featuring this gang of eight.

The Salt Collective (L-R): Matthew Caws, Chris Stamey, and Stéphane Schück on the streets in Paris filming “Another Bus Coming” video. Photo: director Hector Di Napoli

City Winery Boston will be enveloped by the fragrant aroma of power pop and slightly bitter taste of modern indie rock when the multipronged octet The Salt Collective takes the stage on January 22.

Comprising this gang of eight will be Stéphane Schück and Fred Quentin of the French quartet SALT, Nada Surf’s lead singer Matthew Caws, singer, songwriter, guitarist Lynn Blakey of Tres Chicas, Chris Stamey, Mitch Easter, and Gene Holder, all of whom were in the late-’70s power pop band Sneakers and the latter two of whom were members of the early-’80s power/jangle pop group The dB’s, and Rob Ladd of the Easter’s post-Sneakers project Let’s Active, whose configuration once included Blakey. (Easter also served as a producer for — among many others — R.E.M., Velvet Crush, The Old Ceremony, Game Theory, and The Loud Family, while Ladd appeared on Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide since 1995.)

And these folks don’t even account for all of the personnel of The Salt Collective’s album Life, which appeared in May of last year.

The name that will be most significant to locals is that of the erstwhile Blake Baby and Lemonhead Juliana Hatfield, whose presence brought along another Boston-area resident to Life’s proceedings, Q Division Studios manager and producer Ed Valauskas.

“I recorded Juliana on the song she sang lead on [“Where the Wild Things Are”], as well as the song she sang background vocals on with Matthew Caws [“Asylum”],” Valauskas explained via email. “We recorded her vocals in my basement studio [in Medford] around the time we were working on her ELO covers record.”

Alas, Hatfield — who recorded an LP with Caws under the name Minor Alps in 2013 — will not be part of the City Winery lineup on the 22nd. However, she will be there exactly one week later for a solo performance that will showcase Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO.

The list of familiarly named participants doesn’t stop there.

It also includes modern power pop master Matthew Sweet, the massively influential Television guitarist Richard Lloyd (who appears on numerous Matthew Sweet recordings), Will Rigby and Peter Holsapple, who made up The dB’s’ rhythm section, veteran singer Susan Cowsill (who is Holsapple’s mother-in-law), and Pat Sansone, whose tenure in Wilco will reach the two-decade mark this year.

Adding extra spice to Life are Salt drummer Benoit Lautridou, cellist Leah Webster, violinist Laura Thomas, flautist and saxophonist Matt Douglas, singer Faith Jones, prolific solo artist Anton Barbeau (who sings and cowrote “A Piece of Candy”), and the Schück Family Singers.

On paper, this project might sound like a well-intentioned proposition that in execution turned into a case of too many cooks. I, myself, was a bit skeptical, or at least prepared to be disappointed given the talent involved.

Thankfully, a single listen to Life disabused me of that uncertainty. In turn, I am happy to offer my assurance to all interested parties that the album is as enjoyable and interesting as one would hope for from an effort featuring all of the known quantities.

And thanks to contributions of the less-familiar Stéphane Schück, there is even an air of mystery about it.

Schück and Chris Stamey are the main creative forces on Life. They collaborated in writing six of its dozen tracks, while Schück cowrote five others and Stamey penned the Susan Cowsill-sung “Spacewalk 2068,” in addition to producing and mixing the record.

Elsewhere, Matthew Caws gets a cowriting credit for the two songs that he sings, “Asylum” and “Another Bus Coming.” The same applies to Peter Holsapple for “The Pebble In My Hand” and Matthew Sweet for “Dream Inside Me,” which kicks off with unmistakably Television-inspired riffs that, interestingly, are not provided by Richard Lloyd.

The audience to which The Salt Collective’s upcoming stop at City Winery appeals is as niche as it is fanatical.

Nada Surf continues to draw enthusiastic crowds to its regular visits to the Boston area in its fourth decade as a recording and touring unit.

The dB’s’ output has been sparse since the early ’80s, but thanks to their first two albums (Stands for Decibels and Repercussion), they maintain the distinction of being what AllMusic’s Mark Deming calls “the band that bridged the gap between classic ’70s power pop (defined by bands such as Big Star, Badfinger, and The Scruffs) and the jangly new wave of smart pop personified by R.E.M.”

And remember that band that I mentioned called Sneakers? They will play an opening set featuring Chris Stamey, Mitch Easter, Gene Holder, and Rob Ladd.

Their discography is limited to one EP and one LP in the late ’70s, but they were more than simply the precursor to The dB’s. In the words of Deming’s AllMusic colleague Stephen Thomas Erlewine, their sound “point[ed] the way to such latter-day popsters as Guided by Voices and the Elephant 6 collective.”

Honestly, I am uncertain how long it has been since these Sneakers and dB’s bandmates appeared onstage together, in Boston or anywhere else. That alone should attract a multitude of enthusiasts.

That they will be serving up sparkling brand new material with Nada Surf’s lead singer and several other amazing talents will make the show all the more flavorful.

Blake Maddux is a freelance journalist who regularly contributes to the Arts Fuse, Somerville Times, and Beverly Citizen. He has also written for DigBoston, the ARTery, Lynn Happens, the Providence Journal, The Onion’s A.V. Club, and the Columbus Dispatch. A native Ohioan, he moved to Boston in 2002 and currently lives with his wife and six-year-old twins — Elliot Samuel and Xander Jackson — in Salem, MA.