by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
For the better part of 70 years, the building blocks of guitar music have been essentially the same: electrically charged hunks of wood, some percussion, and often the human voice. That’s it. Even the elementary particles of life have more moving parts. The fact we keep re-arranging these few components into compelling music is a testament to our relentless and innate desire to create. Pom Poko’s album from earlier this year, Cheater, is an example of how, with the right tweaks, a few people using the same basic elements that have given us as disparately sounding bands as U.S. Maple and Steely Dan can make something new.
Pom Poko hail from Norway but are named for 1994’s Pom Poko, a Japanese animated film about the tanuki – magical raccoon dogs in Japanese folklore capable of shape-shifting into all sorts of things. The namesake feels apt. Like the tanuki themselves, the music of Pom Poko is mischievous, enigmatic, and ever-shifting. The playful attack of the guitars, bass and drums, plus the music-box lilt of singer Ragnhild Fangel’s vocals can be at turns harmonious or chaotic. In whatever shape it takes, the music on Cheater flat-out rips.
Sure, some of the young band’s influences are worn on the sleeve. Fangel sounds like if Nina Persson grew up on a steady diet of Deerhoof. But hey, we sound like how we sound. In Fangel’s case, she deftly navigates the maze of her influences by consistently surprising us, bouncing from Scandinavian pop (“Like a Lady”) to experimental (“Andy Goes to School”) to post-punk (“Look”) with the kind of ease that differentiates singers in bands from people in bands who sing because there’s no one else to do it.
The playing on the album embodies the charming quality of talented people who hold little regard for rules. Churning through micro-genres of rock music – math, post-punk, and noise pop – at will, Cheater is an album of cheat-codes in a video game about being in a kick-ass band. The ferocity of the playing in songs like “Cheater” and “My Candidacy” shouldn’t be surprising. Pom Poko were signed to Bella Union on the strength of their live show, a frenetic explosion of manipulated guitar music and Fangel’s commanding stage presence. For high-energy bands, a stellar live show is often tough to convert to album. Not so for Pom Poko. Produced by the band with help from Marcus Forsgren, Cheater highlights the ability of drummer Ola Djupvik, guitarist Martin Tonne, and bassist Jonas Krøvel to translate their electric live performance into the album format.
Cheater is front-to-back both thrilling and enjoyable. Rarely is music this challenging so gosh darn palatable. Album centerpiece “Look” is a great example, featuring muffed-out bass, side-winding guitar, propulsive drumming, and one of Fangel’s best vocal performances this side of the catchy “Like a Lady” (whose gender-bending video is a delightful send-up of the social and academic constructs hectoring our current discourse.) If you aren’t having a blast by the time of “Look”’s climatic pay-off – which itself acts like the album’s thesis, punctuated by Tonne’s dizzying pitch-shifting guitar – maybe you just hate fun.
Perhaps the difference between Pom Poko and much of the guitar music being made today is the process by which the band creates. Composition seems to be of particular importance to Pom Poko, who, in a 2019 interview and accompanying playlist, stressed how the influence of improvised music – what Djupvik calls “composition in real time” – informs how the band writes songs. It’s telling that their playlist includes Palm – the Philly band whose Shadow Expert EP is an obvious influence on Cheater— alongside Meridian Brothers and CHAI. Pom Poko is interested in intricate arrangements more than genre-baiting, which bodes well for future recordings. As the band hones their voice, while still retaining the elements of what’s working on Cheater, we can expect their albums get equally stranger and catchier. In the world of guitar music that’s based on such simple elements, that’s an exciting prognosis.