Pomplamoose

Pomplamoose is my first review on what I would call a "YouTube Band."

You may know them as "the annoying couple from the Toyota commercials," as my friend Steve (Not from this blog) described them. They had a few national commercials around Christmas singing traditional carols in their own special way. (FYI, I didn't much like the commercials.) Incidentally, Steve from the blog describes them as "that girl that stares at you with dead eyes." And while she may stare at the camera with the look of a nervous girl giving her first handjob, the music is very enjoyable and creative. (Don't listen to him Nataly, you can stare at me with those dead eyes any day.)

A typical Pomplamoose song will feature Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn performing a song, each playing multiple instruments and singing both lead and back-up vocals. Nataly will often sing the lyrics multiple times for an awesomely harmonious effect. An interesting thing about Pomplamoose is that in the music video you see footage of the instrumentation spliced together on screen, and so you are able to see how they were able to obtain the finished product through hundreds of tiny shots. Things that you probably rarely think about are shown in minute detail. Something as simple as clapping that coincides with the rhythm clearly takes a great deal of time for two people working on such a small budget. Many shots of individual claps are dispersed throughout the video. Though he tries his little heart out, it is pretty clear that Jack isn't proficient enough on the drums to play most songs the whole way through. They get through this with many individual shots of a cymbal crash or snare smash, and fill it in with low budget moves such as drumming their fists on a desk.


There are two general types of Pomplamoose songs: covers and originals; I'll review some covers first.

Jackson Square

A while back, I wrote a post on some of my favorite modern Canadian bands (Located Here). I briefly explored the music of several artists and posted some of their most successful songs. Now, I would like to expand on one band in particular, Arkells. I don't like generalizing bands' sound by classifying them into genres, but if I had to I would describe them as "pop-punk." That doesn't really help you to grasp their sound though, does it? Forget I said it then.

Let's dive into their only album released so far, Jackson Square, which debuted in 2008.

State of the Blog Address

Hello all,

As you have surely noticed by now, we have not been updating the blog as much as we would like in the past few months. It seems like just yesterday that an alive and well Music Box was posting daily. For all intensive purposes, the blog was dead for much of March, April, and May. With the summer season here, we, the writers, find ourselves with free time and a renewed desire to share our musical tastes and experiences.

I would like to announce that we are proudly resurrecting the Music Box from the dark depths of forgotten blogs. We hope to take advantage of the diverse and numerous concerts and shows scheduled this summer in Buffalo and the surrounding area.

Thank you for your patience and continued support of the Music Box through this once dismal but now exciting time.

-Peter