Bedroom pop for bedroom times: Poolblood's 'Mole'

Poolblood is the music of Toronto-based Maryam Said, whose debut album came out January 13. (I love this album cover, a mole rendered like a still from a stop motion animation with a sad little face on it. Truly a pathetic little dude down in the dumps.) I mistook this for a pretty straightforward acoustic singer-songwriter sort of music based on singles like “twinkie” and “shabby,” songs with choruses suffused with the yearny nostalgia of “Unchained Melody,” aerosolized with production help from Shamir.

But when I listened to Mole all the way through, what starts out simple enough transforms into something darker. Their voice has such a sweetness to it and their music such a predilection towards the soft palettes of bedroom and dream pop that when they offset both those things in little moments of sourness — a subterranean cello and out of tune horn section in the final act of "wfy," the fuzzed out and distorted rumbling of "beam" — it's like this creep of dread, intrusive thoughts put into musical form.

Mole is an album about early 20-something restlessness and picking apart mundanities for a sense of meaning. Said does this with their voice, carrying a word through a series of notes long enough for it to no longer resemble anything, a piece of putty stretched out into a mess of translucent, tangled threads. But Poolblood’s micro-anecdotes also reflect the slow pace of life in stagnation. They bring up going to a hardware store to get milk on “shabby” and again on “twinkie” (“i went to the corner store to / feel something that night”). I had a laugh that Phoebe Bridgers had two songs in as many years about convenience stores and now it’s this sort of young millennial shorthand for disembodiment.

But this also feels true to my own experience moving to a new place and trying to fill the hours before something starts or, in particular, becoming an increasingly detached case study in pandemic mental health effects, holed up in my room all day not talking to anyone. Sometimes walking around the block for milk and the bougie organic cereal that’s somehow always on sale is the most exciting thing that’s happened all day. You get outside of your house for a little dose of reality and reality’s stranger than you expected.

There’s a defeatism to songs like “null,” as Poolblood sings about the pain of losing a friend and the holding patterns of working through grief.

nothing else seems
to make sense anymore
nothing else seems to go my way
and i’ve been through it
i’ll just wait
inbetween

I have a lot of grief about the time I’ve lost during the pandemic, the way I feel frozen at the age when it started and experience bursts of panic when I see people who’re at that age accomplishing things I thought I’d have done by now. Life goes on outside my room, even if it doesn’t seem like it, even when it’s become my whole world. How do you express the intimacy and anxiety of that? Poolblood and I are both tired of singing to the same four lonely walls, but they end Mole on an optimistic note, all sweetness: the guitar soft, the trumpets in tune, the double bass finally an enveloping warmth.

and if
it works out
and i end up in
tune somehow
i’ll be thankful for this time
alone
in my little
in my little room

Here’s to another year of fiddling with the tuning slide.

You can hear me talk about Poolblood on this episode of NPR Music’s New Music Friday podcast.