No Self Respecting Indie Rocker Wears New Balance

It's Polvo week here at the Battle for the Earth. After a long, long hiatus, the band has renewed it's commitment to odd tunings and is bringing their unique brand of noise pop back to the aging indie rockers and new musical youth. To me, they are a very important band because along with Sonic Youth, they opened up a world of sounds unlike anything I was bred to listen to. My parents did have the best of Bread on lp but the universe occupied by Polvo was mystifying and magical. They typify the somewhat hermetic world if indie rock in the mid 90s. Polvo was a band who sounded weird, achieved a small group of dedicated followers and never really strove for more, nor were they ever likely to move out of the indie ghetto with songs as willfully obtuse as theirs. They were indie-prog in a way and are probably the cause of my love of King Crimson, Rush and Genesis. My brother Jamie loves them passionately to this day and when I found out they were playing their first show in years at the Black Cat (the club we visited countless times growing up) I got him a few tickets and looked forward to his review. I still wait for the write up on the show but until it shows up in my inbox, let's let him look back at their first ep. Bake it away, toys:

"I love Polvo," writes Jamie, "let's just get that straight off the bat. Not that it
would be hard to discern from what's to follow. I certainly couldn't be called anything like an impartial observer.

Polvo, S/T (1991) - At the time of their existence, Polvo was always lumped into the 90s Chapel Hill scene with its Superchunks and Archers of Loafs, its Small 23s and Ashley Stoves. And while in fact one of the best shows I ever say featured the Archers, Superchunk and Polvo all on the same bill, Polvo always seemed a bit separate to me. I even remember when the Archers’ “vs. The Greatest Of All Time” EP came out, a guy at the college radio station heard a snippet and said “looks like they’ve been listening to a lot of Polvo.” Yes they rocked, but something about their detuned, Asian-inflected sound seemed to put them on a different level. Further, they had a guy named “Ash Bowie” playing guitar – a great name that reflects on Rock history (and the original Bowie’s tendency to be a bit “out there” sometimes) while retaining an element of mystery. But he was the only one who looked the part. The rest of them were just a bunch of kinda-dorky white dudes wearing New Balance sneakers and shorts. It only made the sound coming out of them all the more incongruous and intriguing.

So by the time I had come to fully appreciate Polvo, it was around the time that 1994's "Celebrate The New Dark Age" had come out, full of angular momentum and quasi-eastern bombast. They were polishing their sound, getting tighter and gaining confidence. I don't remember when I even became aware that they had released a double 7" in 1990 or that it had eventually been released on CD, but there it was one day in the store and I had no choice but to buy it. Not that I'm much of a completist - I just don't have the drive to track down every stray crumb that bands tend to drop during their existences and I've never allocated large swaths of money to the pursuit of rarities and imports - but price wasn't an issue and it's likely that the used bins had been a little bit lacking that day. And so Jesus Christ Records #001 made it's way into the collection.

Listening to it in the context of knowing their work, it’s an obvious first album. The influence of shoegaze and MBV/Sonic Youth-style noise is mixed with an appreciation of 60s psychedelia and 70s arena rock. And an absolute lack of anything resembling decent singing. The opener “Can I Ride” showed up in a slightly different version on “Cor-Crane Secret”. The original retains most of the charm and drive of the first but obviously benefited from further refinement. “Leaf” gets derailed by working for a big chorus that just doesn’t go anywhere (I couldn't agree more - ed.). Moving on, the opening segment of “Lull” hints at what’s to come from this band. With it’s swinging, jazzy intro it sounds like something from Exploded Drawing, before kicking into a great riff held underwater by the looping and droning of the second guitar. More hints of the future appear in “Tread on Me” with a staccato opening giving way to loping arpeggios and conversing guitars leading into an aggro chorus/verse concoction followed by an outro that reminds me a lot of Flower (that’s a reference that about 3 people will get). And then there's “Teen Dream” - sung by which band member I have no clue, but whoever it is sounds like a redneck who has done a considerable amount of peyote. The closer, “Snake Fist Fighter” has nothing much to recommend it other than its name, which foreshadows such song titles as “Vibracobra,” “Ox Scapula,” “Stinger (Five Wigs),” and “Enemy Insects.”

In the end, I’m happy to own it as a mile-marker for a band that would go on to do more exciting things shortly thereafter. The songs have some redeeming qualities and obvious hints of promise, much the way cake batter is fun to lick off the spatula (another Chapel Hill band!), but much better after having been baked and covered in a thick layer of icing."