KNBA
Album: Everybody, Come Outside!
Band Members: Jacob Merritt (drums, percussion), Joey Cook (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Josh Kufeldt (bass, guitar) and Isaac Karns (guitar, bass, vocals) Pomegranates' Everybody, Come Outside! might be the most fitting album title of the year—the record is full of the same first-day-of-summer exuberance that you'd expect in any excitable child yelling for his friends to come out and play. The band itself is perfectly named, too, with music that sounds exotic, sticky-sweet and just enough unlike all the other fruit in the market.
That makes the Cincinnati quartet two for two, and with over 100 shows played this year and another album ready to be recorded, the band should get used to such impressive figures. But Pomegranates isn't about statistics, it's about feeling: Listening to Everybody, it's hard not to get swept up in the cascading guitars, chant-along gang vocals, hand-clap rhythms and overarching, almost-childlike hopefulness, like the funky "Southern Ocean" with its joyous chorus of, "We're not scared anymore!"
"The feeling of our music encapsulates the idea of stepping out on a limb," says guitarist Isaac Karns, "even if you're unsure there's a limb to be stepped on."
The main voice of Pomegranates, and certainly a big part of the band's uplifting vibe, is the high, shy-kid-in-the-corner warbling of Joey Cook. After he retired his pro-skateboarding dreams ("I gave my ankles and shins a break," he says. "And realized I wasn't very good.") he began writing tunes in high school. But he wasn't always creating such summer-fun gems. "[My first songs] were these dark, macabre instrumentals on my mom's piano," he says. "One time my dad was watching TV and called, 'Knock off that Castlevania stuff.'"
The upcoming, as-yet-unnamed album will be the band's third LP, and will feature "a little more rocking, and a lot more psychedelic" sound than the flowing, ethereal reverb waves of Everybody, said drummer Jacob Merritt. He says it'll be a bit more melancholy, too—but don't expect the band to turn into Joy Division. He and his Pomegranates know their music's hopefulness is just as important to them as it is to their growing fans.
"Though I might have to keep working at Panera, music is something I need to do," Cook says "Knowing we're a part of something that's affecting people, it makes me feel selfish to think 'I need to get a real job.'"
