Dougie Poole
The Rainbow Wheel Of Death
★★★
WHARF CAT. CD/DL/LP
Singer, songwriter, computer programmer, some-time Stetson wearer, New Yorker.
Three LPs in, Dougie Poole is beginning to carve out an urban country niche. With a voice that’s as classic country as Buck Owens and the ability to twang with the best of them here on Worried Man Blues 2, there’s a part of him that’s unashamedly traditional. There’s more to him than that though. On an LP recorded with a band at his coproducer’s parents’ house, he displays a knowing way with a city boy’s surreal lyric, musing on Nickels & Dimes that, “I picked you up a knockoff watch and I came home to find you’d filled the bathtub to the brim with nickels and dimes”. Meanwhile, on Must Be In Here Somewhere he manages to combine the country staple of mourning a broken relationship with the relatively new-fangled notion of looking for a long-lost e-mail about it.