Jerm Reviewed

Jerm Pollet

Every Song Is a Mating Call

Not unlike the picture of a stuffed monkey wearing a cowboy hat inside the CD booklet to Every Song Is a Mating Call, Jerm Pollet plays jack-of-all-trades with sweeping panache. From Mr. Sinus Theatre to bands like Gal's Panic, Missile Command, and Tall, Dark, & Lonesome, New York native Pollet has been cross-breeding music and humor in Austin for more than a decade, and for the first time, released an album under his own name. If the title Every Song Is a Mating Call makes you suspect it's chock-full of wry lyrics and jumpy tunes, you'd be right. The 16 tracks plow turf so close to Jonathan Richman, it feels like every other cut should be "I'm Straight." That said, Pollet avoids Richman's geekiness, trading it in for a wise-ass attitude that never makes the listener feel like the joke's on them. Well, almost never. From nonsense ("Telephone Stars," "Popcorn Farm") to non sequiturs ("Sexy Secretary," "Goodbye Florence Nightingale"), Pollet's songs are joyous, unselfconscious, and only a little sarcastic. It is, for example, tough to delve the meaning of a 45-second instrumental groove like "Theme for the One-Armed Octopus Orchestra," but with the oblique sweetness of "Helicopter Hands" and "Hawaii," he comes across like an Everyman for the college clique. Pollet's at his best with the quirky earnestness of "There's a Rock Show Happening," leaving the social commentary of "The Battle in Seattle" a bit out of place, but he's nothing if not a guy who can don a Stetson as comfortably as a yarmulke. Jerm Pollet is, after all, someone who can see Jesus in an HEB sign.