**** POI DOG PONDERING “Wishing Like a Mountain and Thinking Like the Sea” <i> Columbia/Texas Hotel</i> ; <i> Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to five (a classic).</i>

“If I should die in a car wreck / May I have Van Morrison in my tape deck,” sings Poi Doggie Frank Orrall, perhaps the greatest line of sublime affection for music since, well, since Van the Man himself sang about how Jackie Wilson sent him heavenward back in 1972. Not that this Austin-via-Honolulu band sounds anything like Morrison. Or anyone else, for that matter.

A panoply of musical styles--Afro-Hawaiian sort of describes some of it--and the multiple pleasures of life make up the world beat trod by Poi Dog: simple things like “Spending the Day in the Shirt that You Wore,” spending the night cuddled up like a “Big Beautiful Spoon” or walking instead of riding (the Jonathan Richman-like “The Ancient Egyptians”). But as Orrall sings, “The simplest things, so hard to achieve,” and he’s achieved the remarkable with a joyously pan-emotional report to his late mother (“The Me Who Was Your Son”), the peak of an album that can pull you through bad times and make good ones that much better.