#pocahaunted

Pocahaunted "Make It Real" 2010 US Shamanic Experimental Psych Funk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=kVue50kQ4eE

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After a six-month hiatus, a complete line-up overhaul, a trip to SXSW, a UK/EURO tour, and a full year-plus of only playing shows and writing songs and amassing totemic objects, finally Pocahaunted return to the recorded realm with their first album since 2008. Time flies when yr having not not fun and all that. Make It Real collects seven of the band’s 2009 live staples for a 40-minute-ish collage of basement body music, garage dub damage, outsider funkadelic sprawl, voodoo rhythm workouts, duo femme soul vocal dynamics, dripping gold sweat, etc. Recorded barefoot and shirtless and direct to tape at Green Machine Studio in summer ’09 by M. Geddes Gengras and featuring guest bamboo sax by jazz dreamer Alex Gray (of Dreamcolour/Deep Magic) and mastered by James Plotkin. Black vinyl LPs in jackets with warped LA post-Parliament utopia artwork by vision wizard Spencer Longo. Edition of 500....~

Make it real, make it real, make it real. Make it real what? Make it real good. Make it real hard. Make it real long. Make it real. Pocahaunted makes it all ways. Make It Real is my new favorite Pocahaunted release, surpassing the last one by simply being the latest but also by being the freshest. Make It Real has cowbell and organ; has disco boots; is hazy, hot, and humid; is funkier and fresher than anything Pocahaunted has ever released. If you recognize that dubbed-out, laidback sway, it’s because you know Sun Araw’s Cameron Stallone, lucky bastard, on guitar and effects. Make It Real sounds like The Doors hanging out with Bob Marley at George Clinton’s house. In 1986....Stephen Mejias ....~ Wait, this is the new Pocahaunted album cover? Gone may be the days of cassette cases featuring creepy collages and hand-dyed bags with feathers attached, but this is something else entirely. I mean, there’s a parrot with blue Ray-Bans, a giant dollar sign, a “He’s on fire!” NBA Jam-style basketball…What is going on? After the shock of the cover art, I waded into the unfamiliar soup that waited within. From the opening thrums of “Touch You”, the lo-fi recording aesthetic seemed to be held over from past Pocahaunted releases. But, frankly, they aren’t so much scary now, as they are fun. The newly fleshed out band doesn’t seem entirely connected yet, often feeling out the rhythm in progress. The drum fill that opens the song seems to just miss the bass, at first. But, when they do find each other, the groove is fun and freewheeling. Keyboardist Leyna Tilbor and bassist Diva Dompe are a nice change of pace on backing vocals and adding extra power to Amanda Brown’s lead, the two weaving in and out of focus. The group isn’t a straight funk band, but they’re trying their best to bury funk in the underground, lo-fi, droney haze they once drenched over folk (and occasionally over itself). The vocals on “Make It Real” are a bit goofy, but the groans and grimaces that accompany a repetition of the song’s title in the song’s bridge are Karen O on a bad trip. The chattering, smoky intro to “All Of Is Of” may be the strongest moment on the record. Drummer Ged Gengras skitters a clicked rhythm with perfectly placed jabs at the cow bell, while Dompe’s bass poly-rhythms its way up and down the track. The muted, high-end blips of guitar from Britt Brown (who records doomy drones as Robedoor and is also the husband of vocalist Amanda) hit more often than they miss, while the trio of wordless warbles from the female contingent add a middle ground between the guitar and bass. The guitar line on “UFO” begins to grate after a couple of minutes. A couple of minutes later, the track dives into a mess before the bass drags it back out. The downtempo swim that follows works, Tilbor’s reverbed organ sounding pretty Doors-y. It even sounds like there’s a horn section. Elements come into a focus as time passes, until the ten minute mark has vocalist Brown back in a wild mood, howling away over a now-complete groove. The last few minutes find a saxophone over-honking the horn line in a triumphantly non-perfect way that suits the tune to a T, as the rest of the band fades out. “You Do Voo Doo” is silly, to put plainly. The bass and drums sound very familiar, echoing the rest of the album, while the guitar and vocals call and respond with Amanda Brown spitting out the song’s title dozens of times. “Sanctuary” crackles with intensity, the wordless vocal howls going back to Pocahaunted of old. The buried vocals, though, are again repeating the song’s title endlessly. Album closer “Save Yrself (It’s Nice)” is an interesting development, to be sure. Dompe’s bass flutters beautifully, ranging chromatically as Gengras’ cow bell comes out to play on top of his stutter-step drumming. Tilbor’s keys glide before swirling out of consciousness. Britt Brown’s occasional stabs of echoed guitar lay back underneath wife Amanda’s revision of lyrics from Talking Heads’ “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody).” The shroomed out, bubbly groove sits squarely in the pocket, as “We’ve got plenty of time, there’s a light in your eyes” murmurs abound, and wordless howls spin in and out of the fore. In the end, “All Of Is Of”, “Save Yrself(It’s Nice)”, and the second half of “UFO” are easily the album’s strongest pieces, the loose grooves coming together in an intelligible way. The difference between a loose, lo-fi attitude in drone and a similar outlook in funk is a tricky one. Logically, it would work more frequently with drone, and to a better end. When the lax rhythms fit with Pocahaunted’s new lo-funk, it results in danceable fun. But, when the rhythms miss, it sounds like a funk band practicing for one of the first times, trying to find a jam they can work with, which isn’t all that appealing on record. With more time, with more records and shows under their belt, I’m confident they’ll gain mastery over this new sound, but this one’s just too inconsistent....BY ADAM KIVEL...~

In this age of information glut, it can difficult to keep up. Granted, there are many tools at our disposal. We have RSS magick; we have the anarchic democracy of tagging; we have friends feeding real-time listening stats and instantaneously posting show footage. But despite our efforts to keep the pace, it feels like the only real solution is having a biometric port capable of directly uploading to the brain. This info drunkenness, like a bad case of the spins, makes it difficult to focus, to stop and properly digest. Neo may know kung fu, but can he appreciate it? Pocahaunted exemplifies this quandary. With something like 40 releases since 2007, getting to know this LA band is more than a little difficult. The sheer amount of material should breed familiarity. Instead, we just get obfuscation. Did you hear Rough Magic? It was on cassette and limited to only 50 copies. The job of the reviewer is thus to catch fish with a broken net. You are left only with your direct experiences with the material, moments that tie it down and secure it to your memory. Making out with a girl with A Tear For Every Grain Of Sand wafting in the background; muddy-headed, sitting in a stupor after a long day with the heavy vibes of Island Diamonds. For Pocahaunted, there has been no solid, definitive body of work. No widely understood point of reference. Not until now. Make It Real is by far Pocahaunted’s most focused, approachable effort to date. After a six-month hiatus with founding members pursuing other projects — Beth Costantino making it “big” with Best Coast (and leaving the band), and Amanda Brown reveling in the arid haze of Topaz Rags — Make It Real is an album that lives up to its title, serving to give definite form to a previously amorphous band. Strangely enough, the presence of some significant collaborators has helped Pocahaunted define their sound. M. Geddes Gengras (Robedoor) brings a rock-solid low-end to the band’s previously lithe sound. Britt Brown works in his extra-sensory guitar funk. The sax magick of Alex Gray (Dreamcolour) provides some needed skronk. Functioning now more as a loose collective of the like-minded, Pocahaunted has finally realized itself. The major difference between Make It Real and every other Pocahaunted release to date is the presence of digestible songs. On prior releases, songs would average eight minutes (at least). Here, there’s a handful of songs clocking in at under five. The opening salvo of “Touch You” and “Make It Real” are wonderful nuggets that highlight the band’s newfound penchant for hypnotic grooves. The presence of Brown’s psych guitar, Diva Dompe laying down syrupy basslines, and some wonderfully throwback organ-grinding by Cameron Stallones (Sun Araw) make for the most instantly enjoyable Pocahaunted songs to date. And, of course, there is the shamanic vocal tag-teaming, not simply aiming to invoke desert spirits as in the past, but now also invoking your ass to get up and move. “All Of Is Of” and “Sanctuary” are both nimble little jams. Even the extended numbers seem to have more focus, more life. “UFO” and “You Do Voo Doo” advance like opaque apparitions, all the parts jiving in lock-step unison. The longer ones are best enjoyed like a 3D picture hunt: the less you focus, the more you see. Make It Real is a much-needed entry point to Pocahaunted’s vast body of work. Now, instead of getting tongue-tied and promising to make your friends a mix that you’ll never get around to, you can point them toward this utterly enjoyable album. And if you are new to Pocahaunted’s realm, Make It Real will indeed be a very real experience for you. In this case, “accessible” is far from a dirty word, instead functioning as a totemic key for all to grasp....by JORDAN REDMOND...~

The first album by a reconfigured Pocahaunted, Make It Real solidifies the band's rambling tribal funk improvisations and dubby productions into something far more traditionally band-like. Though the sense of complete unpredictability is removed -- steady trap drumming will do that -- there is still enough weirdness to keep the group's sound consistently bizarre, despite transforming from the duo of Amanda Brown and Bethany Cosentino to a Brown-led quartet following Cosentino's departure for New York (where she founded Best Coast). With Sun Araw's Cameron Stallones adding organ, songs like "U.F.O." move from loose shuffles into outer space and back. Stallones' presence is particularly felt on "You Do Voo Doo," the organ and drumming giving the tune a strobe-lit psychedelic throb. (And then there's even a guitar solo!) Other tunes are even more melodious, including the vibrant (but no less scattered) "Save Yrself (It's Nice)," which goes over like a sloppy, garage version of tropical-era Animal Collective....by Jesse Jarnow...allmusic...~

I first heard of Pocahaunted in college while trying to figure out a thesis topic for a Native American Issues class back in 2007. At the time, there seemed to be a whole re-colonization of the "New Weird American" sonic landscape by an influx of mostly urban white psych // folk // noise outfits stomping their moccasined-feet and thrashing their headdresses to bands with names like Indian Style, Truman Peyote, White Rainbow, Broken Deer, Animal Totem, Totem, Totem Music, Totem Spirit Field, Neon Indian, Neon Navajo, Apache Beat, Crazy Horse, Our Brother the Native, Inca Ore, The Ghost Shirt, Creepy Teepee, Wovoka, just to name a few. I decided to look into this movement further, then discovered Pocahaunted and became unwittingly sucked in to their mysterious spook-a-delic world. I must say that after seeing them live several times and getting to know some of the members over the years, I realized that despite their name, Pocahaunted transcends the "just another hipster band trying to be Indian" indictment. In fact, they transcend most catch phrases people try to throw at them. Conversely, they are a rotating collective of down-to-earth individuals who are constantly evolving and transforming themselves and their music to produce an alternate reality that is far from escapist, and instead perhaps even closer to the magical and sacred essence of being truly human. Their last album title, "Make it Real", is a dubbed out, trance-testament to connecting to the "real world" through entering it's dream core, its sacred center, its magical portal lined with facepaint, glitter, and palm-tree graffiti. Pocahaunted conjures the mystical through the gleaming teeth of open smiles. Making it real doesn't mean taking yourself seriously. A lone stuffed Garfield perches stoically on top of a guitar amp blaring divine riffs that swirl around keyboard stands draped with fake flowers and mics magically transformed into ritual may-poles with silk sprays of neon fabrics. Figures appear donning facepaint and sequinned outfits, like some shamanistic-alien-divas performing an exorcism on the set of 80s glam metal music video shot on Neptune. For Pocahaunted, the concert space is an ontological theatre where the real is subverted into a dreamtime that is equally playful and tangible as it is intense and untouchable. "You've got to save yrself", they croon, and they are. Britt and Amanda are dedicated raw foodists (yes, even on tour). Leyna is moving to NYC for pilates training. They are still actively committed to running Not Not Fun (a label with a growing formidable roster of like-minded DIY psychedelic wizards and noise shamans), and continuing to make music through their various other equally mind-melting projects (Robedoor, Psychic Reality, LA Vampires, Sun Araw, Best Coast to name a few). They have internalized the sacred space their music creates and seem to be taking a break to maintain the "realness" of that space within themselves. I have no doubt that this is just the marker of one energetic phase of their creative evolution. In the meantime, Pocahaunted's ghost will continue to haunt the sonic landscape, and I gratefully surrender to its possession. ....~

"After a six-month hiatus, a complete line-up overhaul, a trip to SXSW, a UK/EURO tour, and a full year-plus of only playing shows and writing songs and amassing totemic objects, finally Pocahaunted return to the recorded realm with their first album since 2008. Time flies when yr having not not fun and all that. Make It Real collects seven of the bands 2009 live staples for a 40-minute-ish collage of basement body music, garage dub damage, outsider funkadelic sprawl, voodoo rhythm workouts, duo femme soul vocal dynamics, dripping gold sweat, and dream fulfillment. Recorded barefoot and shirtless and direct to tape at Green Machine Studio in summer 09 by M. Geddes Gengras and featuring guest bamboo sax by jazzmaster Alex Gray (of Dreamcolour/Deep Magic) and mastered by James Plotkin." - Not Not Fun....~

Liens : http://www.notnotfun.com/pocahaunted http://www.sunaraw.com/main.html

Vidéo Tetedemort d'Andy Roche : https://vimeo.com/user933426 http://www.vimeo.com/2445531

Affiche par Kaugummi / Bartolomé Sanson (Shelter Press) : http://shelter-press.org/