3 out of 5

Label: Starlight Furniture

Produced by: Greg Freeman (recorded by)

Tried and true college rock, shot through with occasional doses of the weird – befitting their San Fran indie roots – and Barbara Manning’s knack for injecting quality melody and sneaky emotions into everything.

World of Pooh, named after the fluffy bear and not something else, sit on a weird pivot point between inspirations and what they’d inspire. At the time, there were a handful of bands doing the kind of anti-rhythmic sing-song WoP were, but few managed the kind of timelessness they did – these songs played well then, and play well now, with “now” being whenever you’re reading this. “College rock” can be a blanket term, but I think post- a certain era, it started to take on something that encompassed the slacker rock vibes of Pavement, and the pretty delicateness of Low, and anything where it felt like someone wearing flannel just woke up and strummed a song. That is very much Pooh’s shtick, but, again, there was a knack there for maintaining a melody: to essentially always be writing pop songs, even when tracks would diverge into anti-choruses or noise.

The Land of Thirst walks a fairly straight line, though, with the wilder stuff eschewed to singles or comps, and that’s primarily the reason for the middle-of-the-road rating I’m giving it: it’s a really solid collection of literate, catchy tunes, but I think it grows in greatness with more context of the band’s history and the lesser available tracks that were appreciably gathered much later by Bulbous Monocle. Otherwise, with Brandan Kearney dominating most of the songwriting on the A-side, his tendency toward a very similar, marching beat and monotone vocals leans tracks towards catchy, with Barbara’s spice added into one A-side track, Scissors, and several either written by- or co-written by- tracks on the the B-side punching up the record at key intervals. Flipping the LP to that B-side especially starts to hammer home where the group would kind of fill in the spaces between verse-chorus-verse with some unexpectedness, and Barbara’s lyrics are – to me – so much more interesting than Brendan’s, going a bit more dreamy and oblique versus his more linear approach.

The balance of the album is thus overall pleasant, perhaps only hanging around in your collection if you’d gotten the full World of Pooh effect live, or appreciated its quality as background listening. However, when combined with the rest of the group’s (sparse) output, and perhaps some love for Barbarba’s especially prodigious output following this band, Land of Thirst becomes much more required listening.

Starlight Furniture rereleased this thing like 30 years after the fact, and I have to assume we got some sound cleanup, even if it’s not mentioned. It sounds great, though, and has some really extensive liner notes, plus a hilarious cover / spine which rather masks what the album actually is.