POPE OF YES! YES! YES!
  

    "YES!  YES!  YES!"

Yes, my friends, I present you with a feast! A delicious feast for the ears! Full of scrumptious glockenspiels! Contra-bass bassoons! Glitchy beats! Junk percussion! Imploding time signatures! A smorgasbord of every conceivable sound flavor and texture, so decadent that one can't help but squeal forth:

    "YES!  YES! YES!"

And who could possibly be the chef behind such succulent aural delicacies? Would you believe that is was not just an ordinary person, but rather a Pope? Well it is! But not your average Pope, but the wonderful fantastical and practical Pope of YES!
  
Gastronomic metaphors aside, The Pope of Yes is really better regarded as a musical architect. His music is intricately composed and exhaustively orchestrated. Every song is filled to the brim with interweaving melodies, morphing textures, and sideways thematic recapitulations. In fact, the Pope's music often seems more in line with 20th century avant-garde composers like Steve Reich or Philip Glass than it does Pavement or Radiohead. You'd be hard-pressed to find another band/artist in the current San Francisco indie scene that's tackling such a highly evolved level of compositional experimentation. The sheer symphonic grandeur of his songs dwarf the dynamic range of your average indie band. Each song is a crammed cornucopia of sounds: horns, strings, synths, distorted pianos, kalimbas, YOU NAME IT! All of it darting and weaving and unfolding, exactly to the Pope's liking.

One of the things I appreciate most about the Pope of Yes is his ability to create music that sounds so unique and creative, without being abrasive or obtuse. In other words I consider the Pope's music very experimental but not in the same way I'd consider the Boredoms or Black Dice or Animal Collective experimental. Those bands build their songs out of sound sources that have been twisted beyond recognition.  The Pope of Yes creates his music not by abstracting all his sound sources (though his music certainly has a fair amount of sonic manipulations lurking about), but rather by re-contextualizing them and putting them together in combinations and sequences that are far from obvious but incredibly intriguing.  When you listen to the Pope you can focus on individual instruments and note how they might play familiar patterns. (For example, he once told me that the bass line in one of his songs was modeled after the kinds of tuba parts he heard in the mariachi music blasting out of bars in the Mission.) But when you take in his music as a whole, you don't hear the loose fragments, but an impressively rich and cohesive sound, that floods the senses.

We've all probably seen at least one "one man band" set up at a live show: performing along with a prerecorded backing track, in lieu of a physical band. The Pope of Yes's live show is similar but he takes this approach one step further. He doesn't just have a prerecorded backing band; he has a straight up backing orchestra!  Towering, epic music, in full regalia! It’s hard to connect the sounds you're hearing with the sight in front of you. With layer upon layer of melodies and rhythms and patterns, it almost seems too huge to be created and helmed by a single young lad. A common pitfall for this "one man band" approach to live performance is how easily it can disintigrate into little more than glorified karaoke.  The Pope bypasses this snag by performing all the drumset parts of his song live along with the pre recorded tracks.  By having a key element of the music being physically performed  the overall performance becomes much more tangible and "human".

Dancing to his music is a key component to the Pope of Yes experience. Despite that fact that elements of electronic dance music and hip hop poke their head up periodically, the Pope's music isn't made for bumping and grinding. It's for the most belligerent kind of giddy little kid dancing you can imagine.  This is adventure music. It requires FULL PARTICIPATION.  This isn't for tapping your foot and slyly bobbing your head. I mean, c'mon! Here we have an individual who has crafted intricate symphonic explosions that swell to ever growing heights! How can standing still amidst such music be acceptable?

In a just world, dancers would swirl around the jaded hipster posers in a dizzying tornado until the haters just turned to dust and were gone with the breeze. But also in a just world, the Pope's music would be played by the kind of symphony orchestra that Berlioz or Wagner used to rock. And his music would be performed in a ball room with exquisitely dressed loonies, drinking absinthe and mad with lust and joy, leaping and giggling and never seeming to touch the ground. But now we're getting away from the point. And the point is that The Pope of Yes is epically, deliciously awesome! His music is much bigger than a one-man band! His Music is much more than samples, beats and melodies! The whole is greater than the sum of its parts! Have a taste, see for yourself....

[AJ Mckinley]

[STREAM] Pope of Yes: Various Tracks