Tall, Dark & Lonesome
It Ain’t a Party Until Someone Gets a Haircut (Pope Yes)
Jerm Pollet, the ex-New Yawk transplant who first washed up in Austin in the early Nineties with the Brother’s Cup crew, and later went on to local ska-punk band Missile Command, has made a habit of twisting genre music to his own sly and occasionally wacky purposes. This semi-live recording culled from his occasional gigs around town under the TD&L moniker is less rock than punk, sounding and feeling more than a little like an Upper West Side Jonathan Richman pondering life on the curb outside Katz’s Deli. With TD&L, Pollet marries his charm-heavy adolescent croak to comic-confessional storytelling backed with acoustic noodlings and frequent lapses into brilliance; there’s much talk of ex-girlfriends, newfound love, metaphors for basements, meteors, helicopters, and so on. He’s been called a Renaissance man, but more to the point, Pollet’s a poet and observer with a keen eye and an even keener wit, ready and able to grin through the brouhahas of daily life and perhaps more than willing to give you the occasional hotfoot just to see how far you jump and what you do when you come back down. (Thursday, Mar 16, Ruta Maya Coffee House, 7:30pm)
This article appears in March 3 • 2000.