POZI - SMILING POOLS (PRAH)

This deeply engaging three piece have absolutely got in my ears and my head.

Of course, in a technological epoch in which the accentuated/emphasised ‘interactivity’ of things has only served a ferocious, endless solipsism and individuality one has to ask - who is forming BANDS anymore? I’ll tell you who - folk who need it, folk who know how others aren’t there to serve your ego or be part of your ‘vision’, rather others can bring out of you that which you didn’t even know was there. It’s magical when it happens right. Ergo Pozi, who I am pronouncing as rhyming with Cozy even if it’s meant to rhyme with Ozzy. Cos goddamnit I wanna LIVE in this record.

Pozi are a threepiece. Tom Jones and Toby Burroughs are bass and drums, perhaps not in that order. Absolutely key to their sound is what Rosa Brook brings - violins and strings that sigh and curl and bend every melodic shape of the enchanting opener ‘What You Came For‘ into your cortex, an entire song constructed from a curious semitonal upward curlicue but what’s immediately apparent is the sublimity of Pozi’s sound - warmly produced bass and drums and violin, sealed with an intuitive well-rehearsed strength. The violin, immediately and throughout, puts me in mind of King Of The Slums, Raincoat’s ‘Odyshape’ but the overt post-punkness of this sound never makes Pozi feel like a retrograde proposition - rather, like say the similarly immaculate Badge Epoque Ensemble, this is an old sound retooled for songs that could only have happened right now. The vocals, like everything here, are carefully composed while sounding like they've emerged from this band playing with each other until everything’s intutitive and instant - there’s none of the lazy will-this-do semi-improvisational meh-ness of so much indie pop atm, every line musically and lyrically matters.

I have a cast-iron rule when it comes to listening and it has always been with me. You’ve got ten seconds to get me. If those ten seconds don’t grab me I’m gonna move on. This serves my way of listening which is entirely pop (and pop is a way of listening to music, not a genre of music) but doesn’t negate the esoteric - even if all I hear is silence, that might be intriguing enough. Crucially in that ten seconds, I learn what I need to know in order to decide whether to proceed - the sound of course, and whether it floats my boat, or at least sinks it in an engaging manner, but crucially motivation. If I sense the motivation is rascally, evasive, macho, musicianly, you will be subsequently ignored. If I sense the motivation is delight, the jib open, confident even if it’s a quiet confidence, I will listen on. Pozi’s lovely wonky melodic kind of avant-pop, grabbed me within ten seconds of me first playing their new album. And I keep coming back because their sherbert is so toothsome, their contact-hit so delicious but crucially because I trust them implicitly and immediately. They’re not in the business of fucking around or tricking. It’s the purest, least-deceitful thing I’ve heard from an indie band in 2022.

So I’m in, and ‘Slightly Shaking Cells’ lets me know committment is a smart move here, a faint sense of King Of The Slums’ trippiest moments (but without rancour, only hermetic enjoyment), electronic drones and textures slathering the beautifully balanced riddim chassis. The poppiest moment here ‘Falling’ has the melodic strength and subtlety of Young Marble Giants, has the smarts to leave spaces for you to harmonise. You’re 3 tracks in. And you’re not minded to go anywhere. Pozi have GOT you and you’ve got them. Get the windows open.

‘Pest Control’ recalls Stereolab in its motorik propulsion but the harmonies that slowly unfold over its bustling beats n bass are almost Acetone-like in their measured poise, the violin lines straight-up gorgeous, the synths enacting helium-heady acrobatics across the groove. ‘Somnabulence’ is the first time the beats entirely abscond and it’s stunning - just a bass, violin, rumbles and fuzziness and a chorale like Yo La Tengo at their most hook-heavy and levitational. The mix of voices is key throughout - Rosa, Tom and Toby’s voices are unpushy, natural, but cleave around each other like Low. ‘Through The Door’ needs no more cowbell and it’s great to hear Rosa’s vocal actually jump into a kinda frightmarish B-52s yelp - crucially even when melodically and sonically Pozi get darker and heavier there’s no surrendering of hookiness, check ‘M6 Toll’ and its glimmering traffic-free lines of neon glide, the way it pulls your shadows backwards in its headlights, the way Pozi just KNOW how that particular road remains a heartbreaking vision of a future we never got.

Gratifyingly, the craft (NOT graft, this always feel like the band just breathing and being) actually seems to increase the more strung-out the record gets - Rosa’s vocal on the spacey, dub-heavy ‘Heavenly’ and her liquid, glitchy lines that rivulet over the short-sharp ‘Faulty Receiver’ usher us into a final suite that includes perhaps the most spectral Canterbury-esque piece here, the remarkably stealthy, gracefully lumbering ‘Shut Up’, before ‘24 Deliveru’ and ‘A Walk In The Park’, perhaps the most chilling, resistant music on ‘Smiling Pools’, as close lyrically to a spirit of staying in, staying out, staying OUTSIDE looking in on a world unhinged. This record really must not disappear through the cracks of 2023 because single-handedly almost, Pozi give you back a weird faith that weird pop is still being made in weird old England by weirdos for weirdos like you. Very very much digging this.