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The Sounding Board

Pool Kids show depth on Easier Said Than Done

A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.

Easier Said Than Done

Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. I’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.

If you get past the glistening surface, Pool Kids’ music offers some surprising depth. 

The Tallahassee, Florida, quartet mix ready-for-radio vocals with melodramatic third-wave emo to create slickly sweet-and-sour songs. Christine Goodwyne (vocals and guitar), Andrew Anaya (guitar), Nicolette Alvarez (bass) and Caden Clinton (drums) have pushed their sound in an especially layered and glossy direction with their third LP, Easier Said Than Done. That belies a carefully constructed LP filled with sharp lyrics and interesting ideas.

At times, the album can sound and feel like every hit song from 2005 is trying to walk through the same doorway. This is great news for the small group of people who have spent the last 20 years pining for a Flyleaf-Paramore-T-Pain collaboration.1 However, there’s also enough thoughtfulness and craft at work that even people with little affinity for Pool Kid’s clear influences can find things to enjoy in the album.

I know this because that emo skeptic tag applies to me. I have a high appreciation for melancholy and melodrama, as evidenced by my enduring love for Los Campesinos!, but I tend to gravitate more toward sounds associated with Midwest emo or the mis-maligned genre’s punkier earlier waves.2 I don’t begrudge anyone their fandom, but Taking Back Sunday, Paramore, late-period AFI and Panic! at the Disco never did much for me.3 That said, even with the massive handicap that is my personal bias against its sonic foundation, Easier Said Than Done is an album I kind of like. It’s well-made, well-played and admirably audacious.4

Not all of Easier Said Than Done‘s big swings connect, and its worst whiff comes early. The album-opening title track takes things in an Autotuned, almost-clubby direction before settling into a sound more squarely in Pool Kids’ wheelhouse. While it’s impressive that Clinton can approximate skittering 808s, and interesting textures are created by processing and layering Goodwyne’s already-fantastic voice, it’s ultimately a failed genre experiment. That willingness to go for it does pay off later in a moment of transcendent theatricality on the slow-burning sort of suite “Last Word.” The song starts slow with woozy bleeps and bloops and soft singing from Goodwyne, who sounds like she’s coaxing her words through a microphone on loan from the Strokes circa 2001. Gradually, it picks up steam. Stabs of guitar shake the song clean, like a sonic Etch A Sketch, and make space for Goodwyne’s full-throated voice to soar. This gives way to a hard-edged churn that gets a nice bit of extra bounce out of Alvarez’s bass and crescendos as Goodwyne sings to the rafters again, allowing the song to reset. The reprieve is short-lived as ascending guitar slides into a prominent spot in the mix, and Goodwyne seems to be coiling to deliver a vocal haymaker, growing audibly more tense while singing the words “Think I’ve heard enough already/ Don’t you?/ ‘Cause you know I’ll…” Instead of bringing the sentence to a furious conclusion, the tension falls away completely as Goodwyne finishes the thought, “… Say it to your face, put you in your place/ Set the record straight, know that I communicate directly/ Tell it to me now, the when, the where, the how/ Doubt that without that, we could both move on smoothly.” As the words come cascading out of Goodwyne’s mouth, the burbling guitar is her lone accompaniment, creating a transfixing duet. The report of a drum punctuates Goodwyne’s sentences, growing more frequent and becoming a steady heartbeat as she repeats her verse. Finally, the song’s myriad elements come together for a shout-along finish and an eventual fadeout. It’s easy to imagine the docile last seconds providing a necessary break for heaving breaths during a live show. On the studio album, it allows for a seamless transition to the album’s next track, “Sorry Not Sorry.”

No other song on Easier Said Than Done matches the twirling Roman candle fireball rise of “Last Word,” but a few of its 11 tracks offer similar satisfaction with stylistic departure or extra flair. “Dani” is a melodic stomper with appropriate heft to match its heavy childhood confessional lyrics. It displays some sonic ingenuity using a whistling sound and static pops to simulate fireworks.5 “Perfect View” is an impressively lovelorn track built around delicate lapping waves of guitar. It’s the perfect backdrop of a sappy snapshot of life on the road complete with a warts-and-all description of a free crash pad near Tampa Bay that demonstrates an eye for detail: “The toilet won’t flush, and the bedframe is bent/ And our window is facing a wall of cement/ But it’s a perfect view/ ‘Cause I’m here with you.”

That kind of attention to detail runs through Easier Said Than Done. Even when things don’t totally work, there’s obvious intent and thought at work that’s charming. The lyrics have a pointed specificity. The tracks flow. It’s a cogent, coherent and cohesive whole. It’s an LP that starts with its title track and ends with a song titled “Exit Plan,” which functions as an alternate title track thanks to the lines, “It’s a long drive home when you’re chasing the sun/ I’m not gonna change/ It’s easier said than done.” The album might not always be my cup of tea, especially during its lapses into straightforward mall music emo, but it’s easy to appreciate just the same.

  1. Paramore, also a femme-fronted emo band from the South, is an influence for the band and part of Pool Kids’ story. Hayley Williams of Paramore’s public fandom of the band helped raise the Pool Kids’ profile. (https://blog.music-man.com/artists/pool-kids-hits-the-road-on-tour-after-signing-with-hayley-williams-in-this-exclusive-qa/) ↩︎
  2. A few years ago, the Ringer posted a deluge of emo-related content for what it dubbed Emo Week that made me reassess my relationship with a genre I thought I had long kept at arm’s length. A deep and abiding love for Pinkerton should have been a hint that perhaps emo music was closer to my heart than I realized. Positively adoring the band Martha should’ve been another tip-off. ↩︎
  3. Fall Out Boy is intentionally omitted from this list. I grew up in the Chicagoland area. From Under the Cork Tree was a gigantic album in other parts of the country, but it was especially inescapable in Fall Out Boy’s backyard. Whether it’s Stockholm syndrome, or that album is actually a super solid collection of moody power pop is up for debate, but that LP did do something for me. Chevelle was popular in my neck of the woods around this time, too. They were bad. ↩︎
  4. My personal level of enjoyment probably sat at two stars. I added a half star because I sincerely respect what Pool Kids are going for and another half star to account for my subjective taste. ↩︎
  5. Rocksound.TV has a track-by-track breakdown of this album in Goodwyne’s words. There’s an unfortunate misspelling of her name in the piece, but it’s helpful for sorting through a lyrically dense album. The heaviness lurking in “Dani” isn’t made explicit, but child exploitation and/or knowledge of an affair seem like possibilities. ↩︎