Album: Poi Dog Pondering, Poi Dog Pondering, 1989
Best Track: "Circle Around the Sun"
Lasting Memory: Poi Dog Pondering has a lot of goodwill attached to it for me because it was a go-to album for dinner parties hosted by my graduate school classmates. I wouldn't characterize my class as a community of scholars, but we did fully embrace the aspects of Renaissance and salon culture that involved eating well and drinking a little too much a little too often while heatedly debating questions such as "Is oxygen really any different from phlogiston?"
Excellent times, those.
Without the overwhelmingly positive associations, the PDP would hold little appeal on its own because it is essentially gimmicky background music. The gimmick is Hawaiian-meets-70s soft rock, and the atmosphericness is exemplified by the track "Wood Guitar."
PDP does have a couple of standout songs, and readers may even remember hearing "Living With the Dreaming Body" back in the day. The best song is "Circle Around the Sun," which would not be at all out place on a 12o Minutes-based version of VH-1's 40 Most Softsational Soft Rock Hits.
Like all yacht rock, the music on PDP is best enjoyed through inattention -- Muzak for the less-than-mundane.
Up Next: The Radiators, Law of the Fish, 1987
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