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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Pomegranates, a Cincinnati pop quartet, plays Saturday in Central Square. (Photo: Modern Outsider)

If you’re in a good mood or want to be in one, try T.T. the Bear’s Place on Saturday: Pomegranates, a Cincinnati quartet, will be on, touring behind its “Heaven” album. You’ll likely spend the whole show in a swooning state of peace and happiness.

You’ll also leave with the band’s “Passaway” stuck firmly in your head. Despite being a band that self promotes as pop, Pomegranates chose to lead with the ballad “Surfing The Human Heart” as a representative video, and media such as the Phoenix and Paste pay a lot of attention to slower tracks such as “Dream” and “Something Everybody Wants.” And those songs are very nice. But for a hot summer night in a rock club, “Passaway” is the reward that’ll keep giving when you return to your job or studies on Monday. See if you don’t keep hearing that sly beat, insinuating guitar and alternating falsetto and baritone chorus (“Passaway! Passaway!”). It’s a total romp, only helped by the fact there’s some depth to dig into if you take steps to hear it again and again (sample lyric: “I love you for real / but I don’t / believe everything I feel”).

Not that you’ll be let down by the rest of the night. Pomegranates has put out four albums, with this latest one co-produced by Miguel Urbitztondo of Sparklehorse and Daniel Johnston fame, and there is no shortage of sweetly shimmering sounds and absorbing words. (From “Surfing the Human Heart”: “If I had never been wrecked a car before / I’d still wonder what the airbags were for / But I’m older now.”)

Much of it is yearning — perhaps predictably on an album called “Heaven,” “Surfing the Human Heart” ends with a direct plea to the “son of / God, I / really / need you,” while the “Something Everybody Wants” is love, love, love and at the end of “Passaway” it’s “Ooh I need your loving” — but Pomegranates never forgets that the goal it’s worked toward since forming in 2008 is pop, pop, pop.

“Unlike past albums,” the band says in its official bio, “‘Heaven’ grabs you just as soon as the first note drops and it doesn’t let go.”

True enough. “Passaway” just happens to be the song that holds on the tightest, and is the most fun to carry around.

Pomegranates plays at 7:45 p.m. at T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline St., Central Square.