It’s always a shrewd move to release an album in early January.
New releases generally dry up before the festive period, for good reason. The charts are clogged up with Best Ofs or new releases by older acts (looking at you, Mr. McCartney) with the very obvious intention of becoming Christmas presents for the older generation, and so ‘standard’ album releases struggle to be heard amid the festive noise.
Fans of new music are therefore starved for over a month, so January often benefits from the demand of salivating indie kids, with the added benefit of slightly more exposure for artists than they may get later in the year.
Good things come to those who wait, and whilst on Friday 15th January middleweights Sleaford Mods and Shame unveil their latest offerings, Pom Poko also take a shot at the now traditional ‘early album of the year’ accolade.
Without having had the option of road-testing these new songs, the Norwegian quartet have simply followed their muse without audience guidance. Time will tell if that’s been a successful approach for them (through no fault of their own), but based on Cheater, they should have little trouble picking up where they left off.
Singer Ragnhild Fangel has stated that the band were looking to embrace their extremes of chaos and harmony, which is certainly apparent across the tracklist. The loud/quiet, frantic/restrained dichotomy is a trick that never fails, and Cheater has that in abundance.
Current single Like A Lady, which is being regularly put through its paces on BBC 6 Music, features a jangly verse before exploding with a grungy, Hole-esque chorus, Fangel even channelling her inner Courtney Love, but in a different pitch.
Similarly, My Candidacy draws out a deft, light verse but the guitar-heavy chorus makes the song akin to being charmed by someone who then creeps up behind and scares the living daylights out of you. Reportedly produced in less than three hours, it’s Cheater distilled into one track.
It’s not all indebted to the early 1990s; the title-track is a combination of robotic funk and New York CBGBs punk at first, before regenerating operatically into several different parts, all held together by a naggingly catchy and simplistic hook (‘dream on’) which lays a marker down.
It’s in stark contrast to previous single Andrew, which is almost laconic by Pom Poko’s standards, Martin Miguel Tonne’s jazzy guitars accompanying some excellent harmonising. Curly Romance has a stoner rock attitude in parts but still with the band’s now trademark distorted guitar work, while the raggedy funk of Body Level is poptastic and uplifting in its surfer simplicity. An anthem in waiting.
Surely a contender for the next Pom Poko single, Danger Baby owes a debt to the winding afro-beat populated by Vampire Weekend, with melodic elegance working in conjunction with a memorable hook, and as such stands a good chance of becoming an indie disco staple.
But it’s the freneticism that defines Cheater: on Andy Go To School (poor old Andrew, he’s really getting it) the unrestrained outro bludgeons the eardrums, and lovelorn verse on Baroque Denial gives way to a drop in the style of a dance track, but rather than uplifting bass, it’s watertight scuzzy shoegaze.
It’s too early to say what affect Cheater will have on Pom Poko’s trajectory, as although it revels in its wonkiness, the album is likely to be an acquired taste. Fangel’s sugar-sweet vocals can grate on certain tracks, and the instrumentation would benefit from some variation as the impact of intermittent explosions of noise does lose its impact the further in you go.
Yet it fulfills its obligation as a fun album and, after all, what better way is there to blow away the post-Christmas malaise than with some daisy-fresh indie-rock?
