Somewhere in the United States there is a Wawa convenience store assistant sitting listlessly at a checkout counter attempting to put her neuroscience studies to good use. She deserves thanks for a bit part in helping christen perhaps the most curiously named band currently in South Africa: The South Jersey Pom-Poms.
Hearing bassist Ben Murrell tell it, inconclusive dithering over naming the four-piece finally ended when he walked into practice one day wearing a T-shirt borrowed from that former cheerleading American, an exchange student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN).
‘For me, the idea of girls dancing around before a sports event is foreign — it’s so cheesy. It has a low-budget character that comes with this band and makes so little sense in Durban,” says German guitarist Jochen Zeller on the quizzical aptness of the name.
Whatever the good folk frequenting Wawa make of the shop assistant’s cranial-splitting deliberations is anyone’s guess, but the Pom-Poms are drawing an appreciative and ever-burgeoning following with each tentative step into the music industry.
It started out at the end of 2005 as jam sessions with Zeller, head of the linguistics department at UKZN, and two then-students, Murrell and vocalist Eva Jackson. Drummer Grant Emmerich was picked up a year later and, last week, the band’s eponymous debut album was released after a year of gigging.
It is an acoustic folk-pop offering laden with melodic ballads and coloured with moody, smoky blues. The songs are mainly in English, but there are some in French (Le Dernier Mot) and German (Kaffee um Mitternacht). The lyrics are delicately succinct; pavement café ruminations on lost love and longing combined with playfulness in musical arrangement. Ultimately, it has a quirky lounge-lizard aesthetic — for the listener the ache in the heart is soothed and sharpened, simultaneously. Vocalist Jackson has had an informal training and is in possession of one of the most sublime voices on the local music landscape.
On the evocative allure of her voice, Jackson says she tends ‘to play with the possibility of sound, without forcing an expressiveness, or increasing volume”.
The music composed by Zeller is described by drummer Emmerich as ‘sweet, but not in a juvenile sense, in a musical sense, which is very tasty”.
Emmerich admits his textural brushstrokes come more from engaging with the melody than with rhythm. In his early forties, Emmerich has hopped through genres and his association with Zeller, another fortysomething, goes back to the big band The Burlesque Supergroup, led by the late singer-songwriter Richard Walne.
Perhaps what is most refreshing about the Pom-Poms is their iconoclastic deviation from the currently predominant Durban musical clichés of emo-rock, pseudo-punk or generic hip-hop. Their gigs — drawing admirers ranging from nappie-heads, (f)arty-types and coffin-dodgers — also possess none of the predatorial excess presumed intrinsic to live music.
Live, even some of their reinterpretations, including a nod to Death Cab for Cutie and a delightful rendition of Paul Simon’s Fifty Ways to Leave your Lover segueing effortlessly into Nancy Sinatra’s Bang Bang, shy away from the banal.
Unwashed musical stereotypes are also overturned: Emmerich is a veterinarian, Zeller a syntactician while the twentysomething band members are completing their masters: Jackson in history and Murrell in cognitive science.
Possibly because they have other careers, the group’s vision of the future appears somewhat laid-back. All reflect a sincere joy at their current trajectory and a little bewilderment as to what next.
Cognisant that their music will not get much play on mainstream radio, they hope to extend the musical penetration outside of KwaZulu-Natal.
Whatever the future may hold, it will not include jokes starting with: ‘A linguist, a vet, a cognitive scientist and a historian walk into a bar …”