Pomplamoose: your new favourite band

By: Alison Potstra

Posted: 11/4/08

If you're disenchanted with the current music industry, if you're tired of indie going slick and mass-produced Top 40 pop where every new musician looks like they're from Laguna Beach, then look no farther than YouTube for your new favourite thing.
A grassroots multi-musical project of various fascinating layers, Pomplamoose is what happened when two YouTube musicians, Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte, joined forces. Similar to the one-man-show tradition of musicians like Beirut, Pomplamoose is a one-man-one-woman band that combines the talents of Dawn and her boyfriend Conte.
Dawn's style brings to mind Carla Bruni's sunshiney adorableness mixed with the vocals of Leslie Feist and Regina Spektor. Conte, on the other hand, draws the obvious comparison to Thom Yorke of Radiohead, as well as a little of the melodramatic howls of Muse (without the excessive flourish) and the melodic spite of Brandon Boyd of Incubus without the rock-hard abs (I'm just kidding, Jack. I'm sure your abs are rock-hard too).
What sets Pomplamoose apart from their influences is the fact that they do all of their own stunts. That is, every instrument you hear on their tracks, from drums to the piano to the xylophone to the accordion to the finger sliding along the edges of a wineglass, was produced by Conte and Dawn themselves and then multi-tracked and mixed for your listening pleasure.
Their music videos showcase the amount of work (and fun) that goes into making your own music by adopting a new medium known as the "VideoSong". VideoSongs follow two simple rules:
What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice), and
If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).
Pomplamoose's VideoSongs can be found on YouTube along with other traditional music videos, but there's something so amazing and endearing about watching musicians create an organic sound without the heavy hand of a producer or record label. At first glance, Pamplemoose is just a couple of musicians from San Francisco making unique VideoSongs for a generation of YouTubers; but their music is actually quite brilliant.
Individually, both Conte and Dawn shine with their own VideoSongs or YouTube videos showcasing their specific talent. Dawn's folksy-poetic and insightful "The Big Idea" was recorded in her friend's outdoor garden (watch her at the end when she swats at the bugs that have been biting her while she was recording), and "The Happy Song" (which instantly brings to mind Carla Bruni) was written and recorded in roughly an hour. Conte's videos are primarily VideoSongs, of which the best is probably "Lonely Ghost". Conte also makes some bad-ass musical mashups, such as an Aphex Twin/Bright Eyes mashup and a Chopin/Radiohead mashup, which fuses Radiohead's "Exit Music for a Film" with Chopin's Op. 28, no. 4.
The combination of these talents is an amazing new band that blends sweet snappiness with the complexity of a much larger band.
So far, Pomplamoose is still somewhat obscure but has procured a small, yet intense fan base of fellow YouTubers. All it will take is the acknowledgement and approval of the Converse-wearing set and their fame catapult them into ubiquity.