We’ve featured Pom Poko a fair few times already, and we’ll try not to push them too much in advance of their new album, due in November, but it’s worth us following up on recent release ‘Andrew’, simply because new single ‘My Candidacy’ is simply such a belter.
David wrote previously in NMR previously that he felt they were over complicating things too much for his liking, and I get why people might feel that, but in ‘My Candidacy’ I genuinely think they’ve found the perfect balance.
The band actually address that issue of complexity when talking about that new album, as vocalist Ragnhild Fangel explains: “I think it’s very accurate to say that we wanted to embrace our extremes a bit more. In the production process I think we aimed more for some sort of contrast between the meticulously written and arranged songs and a more chaotic execution and recording, but also let ourselves explore the less frantic parts of the Pom Poko universe. I think both in the more extreme and painful way, and in the sweet and lovely way, this album is kind of amplified.”
So my overly simplified and fairly useless explanation of that is that she’s saying that parts of it will sound more complex, but parts of it won’t. Or very possibly both at the same time.
I’m really looking forward to it, because I do love Pom Poko. I can’t deny that parts of their debut album did take a while to get into, but ‘My Candidacy’ is a perfect example of why I find their music so alluring. For sure the guitar rhythms are almost ridiculously offbeat and quirky to open, but they seem to fuse effortlessly in with the vocals, which offer a simple, cute, nursery rhyme style melody. And the instrumental section after the chorus is the most manic adrenaline rush of sound. The whole thing is brought together when that ‘nursery rhyme’ theme develops into a full blown post punk shouty chorus at the end, cutting to a ‘Cardiacs’ style distant twinkling of the main theme. It's pretty marvellous stuff.
Thinking about it, maybe the most impressive element of this is the way they’re able to capture such live raw energy on the track – perhaps that’s the ‘chaotic execution’ that Ragnhild refers to.
Undoubtedly one of my favourite songs of the year.