Pool Holograph give their dreamy indie-rock a sharp new clarityLeor Galilon October 6, 2020 at 5:00 pm

Singer-guitarist Wyatt Grant launched Pool Holograph as a solo endeavor a decade ago, and around 2015 he brought in a few friends from Loyola University to turn it into a band: Zach Stuckmann on bass and brothers Jake and Paul Stolz of local indie rockers Discus on drums and guitar, respectively. Pool Holograph became a collaborative outfit, with everybody pitching in on songwriting, and they’ve remained active even though Grant left Chicago earlier this year for Asheville, North Carolina. As he told local music site Chicago Creatives in 2019, Pool Holograph thrive on the process of forcing everyone’s disjointed ideas to hang together: “We don’t aim to meet in the middle,” he said. “We like the tension of a new band image bubbling up and us having to deal with it.” Pool Holograph’s dreamy indie rock feeds off this friction; a little tension goes a long way to keep their sleepy melodies from feeling directionless or indolent. On 2017’s Transparent World, the band drape their melodies in a thin sheet of reverb, but on the new Love Touched Time and Time Began to Sweat (Sunroom) they largely abandon that aesthetic in favor of a new clarity. This has the beneficial side effect of throwing their unexpected flourishes–the country twang on “For Years,” the acerbic postpunk rhythms on “Medieval Heart”–into sharper relief. v

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