If you think traditional American folk music is all about frogs and mama, go out and buy the American Anthology of Folk Music. Sex and violence are at the heart of our folk tradition, folks. But if the '60s revival did occasionally glance down at these darker roots, it more often set its sights on contemporary social struggles, forever associating the acoustic guitar with peace and justice. Three decades later the local acoustic scene has produced a number of ("post-") folk stars who mess with our ideas of what strumming sans amplifier should be about, including the Mason Jennings Band and Brenda Weiler. (Both, with any luck, will become giant pop stars in a few minutes.) Still, only singer-songwriter Pablo revives folk's first-person-narrative tradition of sex and violence, and he manages to do so without sounding either exhibitionist or boastful. He has a remarkable vocal range with a throat affectation that's in Dylan's tradition, not his style. Pablo's melodies sound like they've been thrown down a flight of stairs, jumping scores of notes, sometimes in a single syllable. "Goddamn the agile sexless dreams of imperfect history," he quavers at one point on his agile, sexful 1998 album, Vulgar Modalities. You tell it, brother.

City Pages Annual Best of the Twin Cities

Vulgar Modalities cuts straight through the bullshit with clarity, determination and unflinching honesty. Lyrically, Vulgar Modalities is like a series of poems co-written by Charles Bukowski and Walt Whitman. Musically, it's stark, spare and full of imagery, inviting an automatic comparison to early Leonard Cohen.

Pulse- Henry Horman

There are tinges of Bob Dylan and Dan Bern in the poetry of Minneapolis based singer-songwriter Pablo's new CD, "Vulgar Modalities" (Spiderbone Records). His story-songs bare all sorts of personal secrets; they're obscenely funny at times, bone-weary at others, but always refreshingly frank. The music of this new collection, which features just Pablo's deep baritone and a lone guitar, is overwhelmingly mellow, but it's also marked by a purely punk-rock disdain for catchy tunes and hum along melodies. Brash and contradictory, it's a collection that colors outside the lines.

Skyway News- Carolyn Petrie

Pablo has been something of a Minneapolis underground success for about a decade now. One man, one guitar, one name-he has graced local audiences with insightful lyrics, beautiful melodies and dry humor. With the release of his new CD, Vulgar Modalities, Pablo may leave longtime fans in for something of a shock. While I mean this as nothing but a compliment, it is possibly the single most disturbing album I've heard in years. Where many "folksingers" turn their disgust towards societal ills, Pablo turns on himself, laying bare his own shortcomings, untruths and deceptions with an unnerving honesty. Listen closely and you may even hear some of your own lies. There's a lesson here that we could all stand to learn.

Pulse-Bill Snyder

It takes a certain knack to sing raw folk songs about sex and violence without sounding merely provocative or exhibitionist. Pablo has it, and he uses his startling range to play out the drama of his street-level stories. Imagine the old Dylan singing "Lay Lady Lay" with the venom of "Masters of War," and you have an idea of the thrill of Vulgar Modalities , Pablo's new CD on Spiderbone. I can't imagine many other artists singing "Cock, oh infamous cock. Where are you taking us tonight?" and making you want to know the answer.

City Pages -Peter Scholtes

VULGAR MODALITIES - "a Breakthrough in Contemporary Music"

Pablo has scaled the sheer face of poetry and seen the face of a strange and very lovely god. If anyone needed to ask what Pablo has been up to in the five years since his last release-"Black and White," 1993-they won't need to after they've given Vulgar Modalities even a cursory listen. This CD is, in many ways, a complete break from much of his earlier work-a painful break, perhaps, but the kind that allows a breathtaking level of new achievement, musical, lyrical, and vocal. The 13 songs on Vulgar Modalities, from the first phrase of "Tina's Song," are the kind that plunk you down on the nearest chair and hold you there for the duration of the CD, staring like an idiot out the window with your jaw on the floor as Pablo's raw, gorgeous voice, solitary acoustic guitar, and pyrotechnic poetry-in all its naked honesty and weird, inarguable truth-do things to you that are too physical to discuss in polite company. This is music that reaches into your chest and twists your innards, that doubles you over with laughter, that makes you ache. Where "Black and White" lit the brain on fire and sparked the tongue to speak, Vulgar Modalities lights both brain and body and stills the tongue, makes you stumble over your own inevitably inadequate words. In this CD, with its spare, eloquent, and utterly new sound, Pablo has rent the peripheries of his earlier work to find what lies outside. And what lies outside is unquestionably the realm of a matured artist. Only with a heightened control over his own craft could Pablo allow it such free range, and to such remarkable effect. Don't try this at home, kids. This is the work of someone who knows exactly what he's about. Only someone with this level of musicianship should be trusted with such a wild and wily guitar, so prone to spare, apparently random riffs that inevitably wind up snaking into you, haunting you in their aftershock of musical realization. And only someone with this level of vocal control should be allowed to loose what's been called a "cocksure, chestnut voice" on subjects of such tender, brutal, bitter, and sweet natures-Pablo's voice on this recording is not so much cocksure as it is seductive, raw, certain of its huge range and its capacity to captivate. But most of all, the songs of this collection break the conventional rules of lyricism. Compared to Pablo's work, of course, the conventional rules are basically boring, and while it's easy to call Pablo's work iconoclastic, the poetry of Vulgar Modalities is in no way a gratuitous ramble through unusual subjects. On the contrary. This collection, especially in its lyrics, is a unified whole, a bracing plunge into the cold waters of daily life, dappled with the flashes of sunlight glimpsed from below. These are songs of remarkable lyrical clarity and strange beauty; they are graphic, visual, piercingly honest in their frontal view of sex and solitude. They move from the epic to the minute, and in each Pablo finds a means, as he sings in "My Apartment," of "punching holes in the silence"-and as he does not sing, but does not need to, punching holes in the thin skin of the listener, breaking through to that place where understanding lies. These songs somehow find, even in the most seemingly prosaic of still-lifes, the reverent quality of prayer: there is an almost Gregorian elegy to cock as tragic figure ("The Journey into the End of the Night"), a simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious ode to a cockroach ("Cockroach"), a sober contemplation of God as evidenced by olives ("Olive")-the list continues, in fact, for thirteen songs. Pablo's brilliant, wildly improbable and eminently true metaphors explode in the chest with all the force of gunshot. This is not background music. This is the stuff that makes us tick, that shows us who we are and why, that bears infinite listening, and with each new listening, reveals yet more. It would be proper to compare Pablo to other artists, but it would be hard as hell. He's working on other levels, and frankly with better material, than any of his closest contemporaries. Smog, Will Oldham/Palace, and Jonathan Richmond come to mind. There is a certain reverence for his characters and the world he's creating that Pablo shares with Oldham, but in Pablo this is balanced by playfulness, humor, and self-mockery which lend Pablo's work a more palatable and less self-important lyrical tone. Pablo's casual erasure of innocence and wry awareness of the real align him to some extent with both Smog and Richmond, but Pablo veers away from the solipsistic, tortured wails of Smog and the occasional sheer nastiness of Richmond-Pablo is simply a better poet than either to fall prey to the weepy navel-gazing of a number of his contemporaries. While critics are so fond of the monikers "Appalachian" or "folk" for anything spare or acoustic or both, the terms carry little weight in reference to music so diverse as Pablo's-he ranges from more melodic arrangements (as on the beautiful, haunting piece "Day Like Today") to atonal (the hysterical, utterly weird "A Very Funky Dream"), and from throbbing, simple arrangements that highlight the elliptical poetry of several odes, to the shocking and brilliant close of the CD, "88.Whatever" a traditionally jazzy arrangement juxtaposed with a wildly funny riff of words ("Eighty-eight/point-whatever/traffic and jazz...traffic and jazz"). Pablo's mastery of juxtaposition, both musical and lyrical, invites comparison with Leonard Cohen and both Arlo and Woody Guthrie, but this may be a case of the student surpassing the teachers; similarly, his control over metaphor and his use of irony have a whiff of Simon & Garfunkel at their rare, wry best, but Pablo thankfully lacks the didactic quality of any of the above. In "Paris Was Hungry" he sings, "Paris was hungry/ the summer my father lived in the passage of desire...Paris is not black and white like in the movies/ It has an appetite, and full-blown color." The influences are present, but their mixture makes for a powerful concoction that, when all comparisons are said and done, defy comparison. The songs move through a range of emotions, sounds, images, carried along by Pablo's rich and powerful voice and his deft blending of voice and guitar. Humor and pain are not quarantined into happy and sad songs; one of the clearest indications of the maturity of this collection is its insistence on blurring the boundaries of emotions and styles, its refusal to adhere to genre or easy category. In "Day Like Today," he sings: "I built a fire/ I thrust my hand into the flame/ sure enough, I got burned/ but I felt no pain/ I felt nothing/ and nothing's worse than nothing/ on a day like today." The song rides the swells of Pablo's voice to "I want to play you/ I want you to play me, I want to make/ riotous love, I want to taste/ the labor of it/ but I feel nothing." This nothing of which he sings is an absent center, a black hole teeming with life, in all its small details; in "My Apartment," he returns to this: "This is my apartment/ If I want, I can shit in the corner/leave food on the windowsill/ build a bomb/ build another bomb/ but I don't do it/ I just sing/ I sleep/ I sit,/ I live alone/ my best and worst friend is the telephone/ soup on the stove/ silver fish on the tile/ Sun comes/ then goes, after a while." The song, both raw and wild, and one of the more melodic arrangements on the CD, builds to the final plea, "If you pray for me, I will pray for you...You know where I live." From the first song on the collection, the issue of endings, closures, openings, the spaces between one body and another are carefully discerned and explored: in "Tina's Song," he sings (of a hooker?), "We broke every light in the city/ she drank till the very next day...And waking up in the motel,/ she wanted to go at it again/ Even though we were ruined/ and obviously at the end." This CD is a lonely one-in its incomparable quality, in its strikingly unusual musical variety, in its lyrical precision, and certainly in its material. Pablo has broken some very new ground here, both in his own work and in the amorphous musical genre he is himself, in many ways, creating.

Marya Hornbacher author of "Wasted" (Harper Collins 1997)

"One of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here. Perhaps it's as so many thinkers have said, that it is because of the vileness or call it adversity that such beauty exists." 1

As the title hints, it is Baraka's vileness that Pablo intends to expose. From the first line of Vulgar Modalities, Pablo offers a language unheard in public. We know immediately that we shouldn't be listening. We reach for headphones. A shock artist would push the envelope of language while cushioning the blow with an easy beat (Madonna), or a formula joke (Howard Stern). Pablo does neither. He isn't playing for attention. The whole presentation challenges propriety, theme, composition, arrangement. Throughout Modalities, Pablo's guitar is jarringly unpredictable. Vocally too Pablo is on his own. Like the guitar, at times he cheats towards a recognizable progression then betrays it with a crack in the chords of the throat. These sounds are profoundly private living only from speaker to ear, then embarrassingly reconcealed. These are songs of struggle without an audience to anthemize them.

-Greg Carter
1 Baraka, Amiri. "Coltrane Live at Birdland: John Coltrane Quartet," Setting the Tempo: Fifty Years of Great Jazz Liner Notes, edited by Tom Piazza. New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1996. p.225

Most people during their illustrious careers as music lovers and aficionados will at some time find themselves in the position of having to find the words for something they've just heard that exists beyond the info stored in their current mental archives. I have just found myself in that position. I spent the last several days listening to Pablo's current CD release entitled Vulgar Modalities, and am finding myself in visions of apartment cockroaches, X-rated vegetable metaphors, spaghetti dinners in the shape of my mother, and I say O.K. That's just the effect that this CD has on me. Filled with deliciously warm textural suggestives, Vulgar Modalities is like listening to one's own stream of conscience with a gentle canvas of slightly diffuse acoustic guitar. It took me by surprise from the opening of the very first track, 'Tina' which put me in a mood that I might liken to Bob Dylan on an 18th century British naval vessel or perhaps not...Pablo leaves the morality to the listener. I had a chance to meet up with Pablo at the Coffee Gallery. We spoke and exchanged thoughts at length concerning views on pop culture, the litmus test for popularity, cultural expectations concerning success as well as the process which was undertaken in the writing and recording of Vulgar Modalities. Pablo stresses the importance of intimacy with the listener. "More than anything," he says "I want the essence of the piece that I am playing or performing to come through...as if I were a few inches from your ear relating this text to you in the most intimate of environments." Pablo draws extensively on an extensive theatre background to add simple yet wonderfully effusive lyrical choice to this unique and delightfully untypical CD.

Lick- Geoffrey Glen Schodde

PABLO...THAT NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY PABLO

Prior to listening to local singer/songwriter Pablo's new album, Vulgar Modalities , I had asked a musically in the know friend to sum up concisely the artist's musical prowess: "Pablo's the guy who swears a lot." Thus, given today's consuming electronic musical climate, I immediately envisioned a DJ'd remix album featuring tricky-esque vocals panting the "F" word (looped, of course) over a Chemical Brothers "block-rockin'-beat." This incessant cussing would naturally trigger my guilt-ridden Judeo-Christian conscience, and I would be forced to contain nervous self-conscious giggles until the drum machine hit its last pre-programmed beat. It was quite a nice surprise to discover that what Pablo actually serves up to the local scene is a delightfully eccentric, albeit cuss-ladden, acoustic album on a silver platter. He may be criticized for having the mouth of a sailor, but that's just his hook: The wording Pablo uses is somehow nonchalant, yet gripping enough to be noticeable. Once you take the time to become familiar with the album, you'll find a songwriter who humorously hop-scotches visitors through a guided tour of his own thought museum. Picture an intimate campfire strummer who weaves odd stories with an imagination that begs the circle to endure the pesky mosquitoes and ticks and of course begs them to stuff their mouths with roasted marshmallows. With songs such as "Very Funky Dream" and "88.Whatever," Vulgar Modalities leaves the listener with more questions than answers and a wish that more late 90's music could do the same.

Lavendar- Melissa Maristuen

Local rabble-arousing poet/guitarist Pablo hasn't put anything out in five years, but his new Vulgar Modalities finds him still in classically skewed form. The release party comes with a free CD, which means anyone who goes, wins; folks who like Pablo get the disc and a show for eight bucks, and folks who don't get something to throw. There won't be many of the latter.

The Minnesota Daily-Ryan Kallberg

Poetry can sometimes be scary. It forces you to face something ultimately ugly, ultimately beautiful, ultimately funny, ultimately somber. Following a tradition of storytellers/ poets/ singers the likes of Seeger, Guthries (Woody & Arlo) and Dylan et al., Pablo's quavering voice speaks and sings...stories about life and love-yours, mine, his, ours. Pablo proves one can do more to move than most bands with a major label contract. Face your fears and listen close.

Cake- Mark Olson

Pablo has a hard edge that you are not always going to see when in his presence. You are more likely to be drawn to his humor and quick wit. But analyze his words and you will discover a sharply unique view of the world.

Cake- Mark Bowen

Familiars of the cabaret set know singer-songwriter Pablo to be emblematic of all the best the genre has to offer. Watching Pablo work the stage is a bit like watching a bungee jumper work from iffy moorings: The lift-off is often elegant, the arc breathtaking and the finish always filled with suspense. And behind the Balls-out sensibility is an engaging voice, instinctive phrasing, and some of the better songwriting to bubble up from the roots in a while. 

-David Carr, The Twin Cities Reader

...sparse, profane, abrasive - a perverse amalgam of G.G.Allin and Woody Guthrie. He shocks the listener with Lenny Bruce-like obscenity, and then follows up with touching insight.

Pulse- Brad Cook