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LP
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BM 006X-LP
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$29.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 8/22/2025
"World of Pooh immensely brightened the dark corners of San Francisco, California during the years 1983-1990, with their most recognized guise being the MMF trio that existed and thrived during the years 1986-1990. This is the lineup you'll hear documented on this exceptional collection of 45s, compilation tracks and assorted ephemera. The band has ranged from being a footnote for some to a fondly-regarded memory for others to a turnstile, door-opening band for still others. They arrived in my life as they were slowly exiting theirs, and I eagerly attended a half-dozen shows of theirs circa 1989-90 around San Francisco moments after I moved there. They were instantly my favorite local band, one I was instantly duty-bound to see whenever and wherever they played. Their jagged and discombobulated take on underground pop music was exceptionally fertile, feral and fetching, and it served as a personal gateway drug that flowered my own appreciation for many different kinds of subtle musical tension. I also spent at least five glorious years watching Jay Paget, who drummed for World of Pooh and later the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, ply his rhythmic trade with much aplomb. And I'll admit to an untoward admiration of (and fascination with) World of Pooh founder, guitarist and singer Brandan Kearney from the moment I met the guy. Everything he and his band were doing, along with the mind-boggling DIY gunk he was pushing through his record label, Nuf Sed, and via his multiple other bands (among them: Caroliner & Archipelago Brewing Company, with several more to follow), made me extremely curious and not a tiny bit jealous about these wiser, weirder and musically more daring freaks who were making art, love and war in the relatively grittier and non-gentrified San Francisco of the day. What I've learned in the 35 years since the band broke up is just how highly regarded they were (and remain) by not only those who saw them, but by a now-considerably larger group of humans who've subsequently heard & loved their records. I know that their place in the late 1980s was a small but special one, and I've seen plenty of online clamoring for more, more, more about this ephemeral and poorly-documented band. And rightly, here it is, lovingly assembled: their two hard-to-come-by 45s, a handful of comp tracks, and a quartet of phenomenal songs just coming to light for the first time, including that Half Japanese cover that dimly existed in my memory as a live song they naturally pulled off with sangfroid, from a time and space when we were all a little younger." --Jay Hinman
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STAR 029LP
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"During their three-year existence in the mid-'80s 'San Francisco's World Of Pooh manifested all kinds of reverent beauty-moves ... interwoven with darker mutterings and visual clews that seemed designed to confound and obfuscate. It wasn't until much later that ... listeners ... would discover how bipolar the band's actual wobble was ... The music of World Of Pooh is some of the definitive American underground pop bastardization created in the latter half of the Twentieth century ... [M]aybe [the vocal and instrumental glisten] isn't quite as pleasant as you'd originally thought. Indeed, their whole gestalt is pretty goddamn twisted..., in such an empathetic and human way that it can't but help draw you in... Because their ending was as rife with public commotion as their birth had been with the private variety, it always seemed highly unlikely that the exquisitely balanced songs ... would ever reappear in graspable form. But time is a universal salve. And we should be glad of it. Because hearing this music, using ears that have been bored stupid by endless gushes of null-minded pap, it is possible, finally, perhaps, to appreciate the indelicate tension and unholy stylistic alliances that made World of Pooh so special..." --Byron Coley
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