Review: Poi Dog Pondering's '7'
Poi Dog Pondering, “7” (Platetectonic Music) 
The music of Poi Dog Pondering can grow on you, like a mold or a fungus. And if you’re really the type of person to embrace an earthy, organic band like Poi Dog, you don’t instinctively see that comparison as negative. Molds and fungi are the most basic, strong and pervasive forms of life, and you think that’s worth celebrating. Hell, you think it’s worth singing about.
The essence of Poi Dog is stated in the refrain of “Outta Yer Head,” a song deep into the Chicago ensemble’s latest (and seventh) album, “7.” Lead singer-songwriter Frank Orrall sings, “C’mon, c’mon, out of your head now / and into your heart.” Orall’s lyrics and musical sensibility have always come directly from the heart, as both a symbol of romance and nonintellectual motivation as well as an organ of the body pumping its most valuable fluid. Because this record finds the Chicago-based band getting back to basics, performing 14 soulful and neatly arranged pop songs on real instruments as opposed to the samplers and sequencers embraced in previous live and studio outings. And Orrall’s got the body and its fluids on his brain more than ever. He wants to spread those fluids around in the not-so-veiled sexual references of “Sticky” (“I’m gonna stick to you, baby / gonna have to pry me loose now”), “Candy” (“I’m gonna eat you from the inside out”) and “Super Tarana” (“Spread your love all over me”).
The latter two songs are extraordinary — and strangely buried near the end of the disc. “Candy” should be this album’s “Complicated,” a rousing, escalating rocker that starts out with a simple “mood for something good” and builds to a climax of ferocious physical hunger. “Super Tarana” must have a dozen guitars tracked on the same melody (and in a surprisingly rocking 7/4 time signature), and they sound like a thousand “Wood Guitars.” There’s some rather dull, by-the-book soul (“Lemon Drop Man,” “Baby Together,” the almost ambitiously composed “Rusted Weather”), but there are a few moments that conjure the charm of the first record, soft, seeping songs like “Butterflies,” which floats on whispers and plucked acoustic guitar and winds up stinging like a bee, and the similarly acoustic-driven (ah, those haunting, beautiful plucks and slides from Susan Voelz’s metaphysical violin) “Palm Leaf Effigy,” as delicate and beautiful a track as they’ve recorded in a decade.
With 10 members in this incarnation of the ever-evolving lineup, you could call them the Fleetwood Mac of my generation. But the Mac’s songs are usually founded on romantic bitterness and betrayal, and Poi Dog is the warm, polar opposite of that. Twenty years into their musical career, and this album actually limbers them up after their frequently stiff and static electronic experiments of recent years. Here’s to the electricity of the unplugged.