New Band Alert: Pujol

Photo: Jonathon Kingsbury

"The world isn't boring; it's worth celebrating," is how Daniel Pujol explains 10 releases in under two years. The Tennessee native, now based out of Nashville, is nothing short of prolific. But perhaps what's most impressive about his one-man band called PUJOL is that each release is good, catching the ears of everyone from Jack White to Saddle Creek Records (the label behind Conor Oberst).

It's the latter that's putting out PUJOL's latest offering, the fast and furious Nasty, Brutish, and Short. The seven tracks on the EP swing from snotty garage rock to whiskey-soaked southern rock, with Pujol's gravelly voice being the one constant. If it's hard to pin down the band's sound, it might have something to do with its mix of collaborators. "Each track on the EP has a totally different band on it—however, the people on each track were put together to stylistically suit the song as well as the situation that it was recorded in," he explains.

There's also the fact that PUJOL is, in many ways, a reflection of the world we live in, where we can't help but obsessively click "refresh" on our Facebook pages. As Pujol explained when asked about the band's productivity, "First, it's a desire to make and release music at a speed relevant to life at the speed it happens. Second, what else am I to do but my (hopefully potential) job, especially one that keeps me around new people and ideas?"

Among those new people is Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, who PUJOL will be hitting the road with later this month—he just played a slew of shows at CMJ in New York. You can also expect "probably between two to four more PUJOL releases" in the next year, according to the singer-songwriter, as well as a weekly poem/illustration collaboration with his girlfriend called EGGS, which runs every Tuesday on local newspaper Nashville Scene's blog.

As for Nasty, Brutish, and Short, Pujol suggests listening to it "in between being stuck in the pool jet, during cathartic shopping experiences, loudly while arguing about brain-sports, when feverishly counting social currency, while the robot makes your work schedule—or whenever you have 18 minutes of free time."