In 2015, Wyatt Grant decided to upgrade Pool Holograph from a solo bedroom project to a proper band, adding three members including the brothers Jacob and Paul Stolz, a duo who help cultivate silky, vintage hooks for the indie-pop band VARSITY. The Stolzes are a cornerstone of VARSITY’s sound, but on Pool Holograph’s three LPs and one EP as a group, few melodies, if any, should be described as “hooks.” The band seems more challenged and rewarded by teetering on the edge of catchiness, constantly teasing and dodging the logical next note.
Their latest, Love Touched Time and Time Began to Sweat, rides that line better than any before it. On their prior releases, Pool Holograph kept a dose of whirlwind aggression in their back pocket, succumbing to occasional rock-out urges as a way to break up their loping art rock. Here, they cut out the thrashing and growling in favor of negative space. That openness draws extra attention to those melodies, which have a tendency to trip over themselves and still sound in control.
A disclaimer: Pool Holograph recall Deerhunter c. ‘07-’10 pretty clearly, to the point that any Deerhunter fan will probably notice the similarities within seconds, whether in Grant’s extremely Bradford Cox-like voice or in the band’s movements between sheets of haze and punctuated clangs. Given this, Love Touched Time doesn’t always feel fresh, exactly—its strength lies instead in its light touch. Pool Holograph have refined a natural sense of balance between pristine and peculiar, dangling nice, simple phrases, then corrupting them slightly with odd steps that pique the ear.
That’s clear in moments like the outro to “Medieval Heart,” Love Touched Time’s best song, when they squeeze in a stray high note at the very end of the repeating guitar line that’s almost an octave higher than any note before it, like an involuntary twitch that they anticipated and somehow finessed into their regular gait. It’s there when they feed a sample of ambient nature sounds into the background of the half-speed, 3 a.m. stargazer “Harbor Lights,” but faintly enough that it’s not heavy handed or distracting from the song’s plain beauty. At times, it’s there in a phrase from Grant’s choppy lyrics (“your hand in her bracelet” is a particularly alluring double-taker). Pool Holograph found their zone from a route of left turns and controlled collisions. With Love Touched Time, they give themselves some breathing room to explore it.
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