5 out of 5

Label: Bulbous Monocole

Produced by: Josh Stevenson (reissue mastering)

Deny it as I might, forever fearful of once again being that music know-it-all I was way back when, I still think my listenin’ ears be pretty good at finding the “cool” stuff. The stuff that even the New Cools would look at while twirling their mustaches approvingly, tipping their coonskin caps in thanks. But of course, this is essential music know-it-allness, still thinking – whilst spouting a pretty good speech about tastes being subjective – that I’ve got some type of elevated grasp on this massive world of sounds. The impossibility of that aside, I know that what encourages that belief is that I listen to some pretty out there stuff, because surely, the weirder and more “difficult” it is, if I’m enjoying it, the something something I’m capable of embracing complexity and you should listen to me.

I can keep going down this rabbit hole, but really, I’m trying to circle around to a band with a very dumb name that I likely would’ve snubbed just because of that name – World of Pooh – and wrapping my “complex” brain around the possibility of this music existing in the late 80s. It’s not exactly that Pooh’s sound is especially outre, more that their slim scattering of releases and singles prefigured the explosion of college rock and grunge by several years, and not in a squint-and-you-can-hear-it fashion: you’d swear you were listening to a contemporary of Pavement, or That Dog. A closer link can be found drummer WoP’s drummer Jay Paget, who would work with the Thinking Feller oddballs, and that group’s loose-limbed approach to pop is evident on this collection as well.

World of Pooh teamed up two very recognizable names with Paget: Barbara Manning and Brandan Kearney, whose appearances can be spotted all around the fringe world of indie rock starting from the late 80s and then continuing onward, though more rarely producing their own material – lending a kind of elusiveness to their influence. I’m admittedly more familiar with Manning, and I suppose her presence here should’ve clued me in to the quality of what I’d be hearing, but I was still surprised just how ready this trio was with fully-formed indie rock, even somehow shorn clean of the kind of self-aware weirdness / rawness that the bands mentioned (and plenty of others that would follow) would employ; Pooh’s sound is very upfront and honest in getting to its riffs, deploying bizarre bits and bobs – like the stuttering beat of Druscilla Penny – as the primary elements of a song instead of window dressing. And I recognize I’ve mentioned a few general points of comparison, but WoP’s net sound lands somewhere between the poppier edge of grunge and workman-like GBV rock.

As collected by SF-focused reissue label Bulbous Monocole, Tight & Loose collects EPs and singles / comps from WoP, with mastering from Josh Stevenson presumably doing a lot to make the sound really fresh and present, decades after the fact – though obviously the core of that is the music itself. And my brain might break, trying to refigure my internal music history to understand how stuff that I love from the 90s was being made 5-10 years earlier than I realized, but having my brain broken as such is exactly why I love continuing to explore what’s out there…