Poco
Running Horse

THE REVIEW

Without dragging it out too much, I choose this 2002 work to both summarize and, at the same time, put some distance from the last disappointing thirty years of Poco who, after being born in 1968 as glorious pioneers of country rock and having flourished in the seventies with a thick series of records, each more beautiful than the last, managed to remain somewhat palatable in the eighties before definitively losing steam in the following decades. Until their extinction in 2021, as a result of the almost simultaneous passing of the group’s two historic pillars, Rusty Young and Paul Cotton.

Unfortunately, similarly to many (Dylan, Stones… to mention the most iconic) and unlike others (Bowie, Saga, Colosseum…), Poco are among those seventies “dinosaurs” who dragged themselves along until even recent years without achieving anything of note, diluting their youthful legacy with bland and faded releases in their middle and later years. Even the perpetuation of their album covers with the usual horse graphic… a device that now strikes an old fan like myself as a melancholy attempt to capture a last ounce of interest.

For a devoted listener such as I was during the years when they didn't miss a single beat or almost, the repeated spinning of a record like this stirs in me a certain irritation, having to wait in vain for forty-five minutes in search of a drop of genius, a punchy passage, a memorable melody, a lush chorus, or even just a simple virtuosic spark from Rusty Young on one of his many guitars and the like.

Nothing… almost a flatline, mannerism and self-referentiality: “Running Horse” is a stream of semi-acoustic California-style pop songs, made up with stereotypical soft rock ingredients and lacking energy, any flash of brilliance… The sounds are soft, polite, and… lifeless, fit for seventy-year-olds with erectile or lubrication problems.

So is this the music I’m supposed to grow old with? Not a chance! Thank you for everything, glorious Poco, I will be eternally grateful, but this album and its kind have no place in my record collection. Instead, I’ll keep enjoying “A Good Feelin' to Know” (1972) or “Cantamos” (1974) every now and then, without lending an ear or a thought to how you ended up smearing yourselves in your twilight years: R.I.P.