HEYA HEYA HEYA HEYA HEYA HEYA HO
April 25, 2016 9:55 AM Subscribe
"Random" Jon Poole, formerly guitarist for the unsurmountable Cardiacs, is a delightful loud guy with a penchant for killer pop hooks, thundering drums, and saying "GUITAR SOLO, LISTEN" every goddamn time he solos. If you like music that's loud and fast, his project The God Damn Whores condenses "loud and fast" down to a mathematical formula (sample Poolius Caesar and Cynical Haze if you want to know what you're getting into, or Macho Sapiens if you, like me, love the notion of "heavy rock feminism". With Willie Dowling, he becomes The Dowling Poole, whose debut album Bleak Strategies is sunshine with the right amount of psychedelic darkness and political revolution lurking around the edges. (The Dowling Poole's newest album, One Hyde Park, is out this month, and highly recommended if you're into hyperarticulate bubblegum prog-funk.) Good music! Listen!
Came for something new (to me) and interesting to listen to. Was not disappointed.
posted by Thistledown at 11:14 AM on April 25, 2016
posted by Thistledown at 11:14 AM on April 25, 2016
Wow, that Zappa covers album is note-for-note amazing; and I do loves me some Mothers of Invention. Wow. I cannot wait to hear the rest of his stuff.
Thanks for sharing!
posted by the matching mole at 12:01 PM on April 25, 2016
Thanks for sharing!
posted by the matching mole at 12:01 PM on April 25, 2016
I clicked into the comments, not because I am into it, but because I had never heard of him and it sounded interesting in the least. While I did not particularly like the Heya Heya Ho album, he seems like a talented and creative guy. I did like the Zappa cover album.
posted by AugustWest at 12:04 PM on April 25, 2016
posted by AugustWest at 12:04 PM on April 25, 2016
I would add also, that the post appeared to have had a lot of effort and thought put into it which for me, is a good enough reason to click into it even if there were only three comments.
Thanks for the post.
posted by AugustWest at 12:06 PM on April 25, 2016
Thanks for the post.
posted by AugustWest at 12:06 PM on April 25, 2016
Some authors get paid by the word; I'm convinced Cardiacs get paid by the chord change, multiplied by distance along the circle of fourths. Not that this is a bad thing at all.
posted by kurumi at 1:09 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by kurumi at 1:09 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
Rory you have such a specific music taste but I really don't know what to call this genre of music you love. It's like...Ptolemy-pop? Archaic, over-complicated, gorgeously virtuosic yet deeply humane, and more than anything fundamentally, tragically wrong. Or something else idk. I really appreciate your music posts.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:30 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:30 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
Poto: I, in turn, am genuinely grateful to hear things like that. I take music (and everything else) much too seriously, often in embarrassing or cruddy ways, and there's basically nothing more delightful to me than seeing if somebody else will react to it too.
The closest I've come to finding a "genre" label for what I'm looking for is "zolo", which is an artificial label that most of the artists I know either ignore or reject. I find it's not a very useful guide for finding new stuff, either; I keep finding bands that are 90% of what I'm looking for, and then the final tenth somehow throws everything off. And whatever new things I do find tend to come from out of the blue, and very rarely at that.
I think that Cardiacs (which Poole was one of the rare members permitted to actually write songs for, rather than just performing Tim Smith's pieces) still hold the key for me, in a lot of ways. There's this kind of tightrope-walking act going on a lot of the time, between (on the one hand) music threating to dissolve into sheer cacophonies of textures and rhythms that all upset each other, and (on the other) a human or humans trying to express something meaningful, and threatening to ruin what's sincere or heartfelt by letting it come out too mundane, too straightforward, and too cerebral or colorless for it to even remain the same sentiment that started being thrown into the mix in the first place.
(I look for that in everything, not just music, and sometimes feel that it's more profound if I can find it in literature or a video game or a philosophy, versus in a commitment-free pop song. But pop is just so damn convenient, and it's easier to throw out five hundred songs looking for the one that rings true, so I have far more favorite bands than I have favorite games or films or books or TV shows, and I can share those way more readily too. Ironic, in some ways, that the thing I love most about music as an art form is how cheap and commercial and disposable it threatens to become.)
I just got coffee with a friend who's in a local religious community, and she talked about how being part of a group of people attuned to spiritual pursuits helps her find peace, and gives her a place where she can slowly grow into accepting herself. The insane thing about art, I feel, is that it enables a similar kind of inward pilgrimage, but it's one made in isolation and across vast cultural and even historic divides. What I value about the sort of enlightenment you find in it is its crass materialism—that is, it exists first and foremost as an object, and whatever you discover within it remains there for you to enter, again and again, until there's no part of it that isn't somehow also you. Which in a lot of ways is far more inconvenient than a more straightforward spiritual pursuit. But it also endures more resoundingly than anything; I can read the Greek philosophers and playwrights, and find them talking for the first time about ideas I only had just yesterday, and pick and choose my community with a freedom even from risk of offending those who I modify or reject.
That archaic, over-complicated virtuosity you mention is a part of that. I think of it as a sort of density. Like dipping something into a formless sludge in the hope that you can pull it out with as much clinging to it as possible. The heartless stuff just leaves me cold, and the too-simple stuff feels too boring to last. But then I get to a song like When She Knows, She Knows, and it feels like it's saying something I've always felt but never knew how to say—and the fact that, thirty compulsive listens in, I have no idea what it's saying tells me the most important thing of all, which is that I still have more of myself to find within it.
I do wish there were better terms with which to talk about that kind of thing, because I've found it to be remarkably consistent, to hold across genres, and to generally result in stuff that has the same few characteristics, even if there's a lot of variance in how those qualities wind up ultimately being reached. I try to prattle on about that less these days. This community's become a place where I excitedly spill out all the things I can't bear to keep to myself—and having any response to that at all is about the most thrilling thing in the world to me, excepting perhaps when somebody reaches out to me and tells me about the next thing that I simply have to try.
posted by rorgy at 5:41 PM on April 27, 2016
The closest I've come to finding a "genre" label for what I'm looking for is "zolo", which is an artificial label that most of the artists I know either ignore or reject. I find it's not a very useful guide for finding new stuff, either; I keep finding bands that are 90% of what I'm looking for, and then the final tenth somehow throws everything off. And whatever new things I do find tend to come from out of the blue, and very rarely at that.
I think that Cardiacs (which Poole was one of the rare members permitted to actually write songs for, rather than just performing Tim Smith's pieces) still hold the key for me, in a lot of ways. There's this kind of tightrope-walking act going on a lot of the time, between (on the one hand) music threating to dissolve into sheer cacophonies of textures and rhythms that all upset each other, and (on the other) a human or humans trying to express something meaningful, and threatening to ruin what's sincere or heartfelt by letting it come out too mundane, too straightforward, and too cerebral or colorless for it to even remain the same sentiment that started being thrown into the mix in the first place.
(I look for that in everything, not just music, and sometimes feel that it's more profound if I can find it in literature or a video game or a philosophy, versus in a commitment-free pop song. But pop is just so damn convenient, and it's easier to throw out five hundred songs looking for the one that rings true, so I have far more favorite bands than I have favorite games or films or books or TV shows, and I can share those way more readily too. Ironic, in some ways, that the thing I love most about music as an art form is how cheap and commercial and disposable it threatens to become.)
I just got coffee with a friend who's in a local religious community, and she talked about how being part of a group of people attuned to spiritual pursuits helps her find peace, and gives her a place where she can slowly grow into accepting herself. The insane thing about art, I feel, is that it enables a similar kind of inward pilgrimage, but it's one made in isolation and across vast cultural and even historic divides. What I value about the sort of enlightenment you find in it is its crass materialism—that is, it exists first and foremost as an object, and whatever you discover within it remains there for you to enter, again and again, until there's no part of it that isn't somehow also you. Which in a lot of ways is far more inconvenient than a more straightforward spiritual pursuit. But it also endures more resoundingly than anything; I can read the Greek philosophers and playwrights, and find them talking for the first time about ideas I only had just yesterday, and pick and choose my community with a freedom even from risk of offending those who I modify or reject.
That archaic, over-complicated virtuosity you mention is a part of that. I think of it as a sort of density. Like dipping something into a formless sludge in the hope that you can pull it out with as much clinging to it as possible. The heartless stuff just leaves me cold, and the too-simple stuff feels too boring to last. But then I get to a song like When She Knows, She Knows, and it feels like it's saying something I've always felt but never knew how to say—and the fact that, thirty compulsive listens in, I have no idea what it's saying tells me the most important thing of all, which is that I still have more of myself to find within it.
I do wish there were better terms with which to talk about that kind of thing, because I've found it to be remarkably consistent, to hold across genres, and to generally result in stuff that has the same few characteristics, even if there's a lot of variance in how those qualities wind up ultimately being reached. I try to prattle on about that less these days. This community's become a place where I excitedly spill out all the things I can't bear to keep to myself—and having any response to that at all is about the most thrilling thing in the world to me, excepting perhaps when somebody reaches out to me and tells me about the next thing that I simply have to try.
posted by rorgy at 5:41 PM on April 27, 2016
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His solo album's good too.
posted by rorgy at 9:56 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]