The skeptics lose: there's finally a new Poi Dog Pondering album.
No longer dormant to the world outside of Chicago, Poi's first recording foray in three years produced a somber, sobering reflection on the curveballs life has thrown in the direction of band leader Frank Orrall.
Orrall, the man who once portrayed the "Happy-Go-Lucky Guy" in the movie Slacker, exposes his vulnerability and rejoices in his strength on the dark, yet life-affirming Pomegranate.
The album opens up with a short instrumental piece that could have come straight off of the Palm Fabric Orchestra CD, Vague Gropings in the Slip Stream (the instrumental Poi album released on Carrot Top Records in early '94). It leads straight into the title song, "Pomegranate," more of a PFO song with lyrics. In fact, the words are almost distracting, but they offer the first insight into Orrall's new mindset: "Time is a bastard. It won't let me patch things up."
"Catacombs," a chillingly beautiful song for anyone who's ever lost anyone, is timeless Poi. It flies in the face of anyone who dares suggest the current incarnation of the band bears no resemblance to former ones. Orrall weaves his words around Susan Voelz' haunting midnight violin sounds, and when the trumpet joins in it's nearly enough to make skin prickle.
True to its name, there's a little too much going on in "Complicated," which, nevertheless, may be the best Poi song ever. It's an invigorating tune, both physically and emotionally: "Sorrow is an angel that comes to you in blue light and shows you what is wrong just to see if you'll set it right. And I fucked up so many times in my life, that I want to get it right this time." Fundamentally, it's the quintessential, toe-tapping, arm-swinging Poi song, but there are too many sounds in the mix. This is the first indication on the album that this is NOT the same old Poi Dog Pondering. This is the Poi that's about to cross over to (gulp) the DANCE genre.
That's right. It's a little funky. It's a lot dancy and not in your standard moving-around-the-floor kind of way. Some might call Pomegranate a soul album. In fact, Poi now has three soulful backup singers -- a woman and two men -- including the vocally astounding Robert Cornelius. Aside from Orrall, Voelz and multi-instrumentalist Dave Max Crawford are the only mainstays and the newer members of the revamped band are seriously redefining the Poi sound.
Pomegranate continues with a fair mix of heavy, groove-laden tracks and the simpler, straight-forward songs that have been characteristic of Poi for nearly a decade. Orrall's no-holds-barred sexual imagery captivates the senses. After all, as he sings on "Diamonds and Buttermilk," "Man must make a beast of himself if he is ever to be truly free."
"God's Gallipoli," named after a WWI battle in Italy, is Frank's bittersweet spoken-wordish tribute to his significant other. Brigid Murphy, a saxophonist with the band, has battled cancer of the lymph nodes, which may just be the single most influential emotional factor behind Pomegranate. "Cancer took the spring from my lover and gave us forever autumn," but Orrall's "back in the ring now with eye held just high enough to see the prize; head bent forward and hip into wind as always."
As a matter of fact, with the band's first full-length release NOT to be on a major label, Orrall proves that he'll do whatever the hell he wants, even if the odds seem to be stacked against him.
