The move would be to pick their second album Today’s Active Lifestyles, which sort of functions for Polvo what Bunny Gets Paid does for Red Red Meat. It’s the album where Polvo’s disparate influences congeal into satisfying alternative rock. With Red Red Meat, that meant old timey songs played on new fangled gear, with Polvo, it meant compressing Ash Bowie and Dave Brylawski’s spiky lead guitar lines into song-like shapes.
The two bands have similar biographies. Both found a modicum of success with college kids in the 1990s, both made well-liked albums and used their goodwill to chase down their wildest ideas (which certainly prevented them from gaining a wider fanbase), and both split relatively amicably, with their members leaving to play music with other people.
But where Red Red Meat never regrouped outside of a few reunion shows, Polvo became an active unit again a dozen years after their hiatus, and released two albums that I would argue are better than the work they released in their first go-’round.
While Today’s Active Lifestyles is a slept-on classic, it also sounds like a 1990’s indie rock album. It’s mid-heavy, the guitars sound cheap, and the effects sound fizzy. And then there’s the singing….
The punk rock revolution of the 1970s encouraged people with nontraditional singing voices to step up to the mic, but, somehow, by the 1990s, that ethos evolved to mean that anybody could sing, and moreover, that they didn’t need to try very hard at it.
Nineteen nineties indie rock is full of guys who couldn’t be assed to annunciate, and Bowie and Brylawski were just two of many. For all I know, the lyrics on Polvo’s ‘90s albums are brilliant, but I’ve never made out more than a couple lines at a time. They don’t care. They mixed the vocals low on purpose, because the real attraction of Today’s Active Lifestyles is the guitars.
And, oh what guitars!
Bowie and Brylawski are lucky they found each other, because they’re kinky little freaks who would have a hard time discussing their six-string fetishism with other bandmates.
They incorporate wild bends, unusual slides, harmonics, chromaticism, trills, and dissonance into squirrelly riffs that ping and zing across their soundscapes. Their guitars knot together like a ball of Christmas lights, so you can’t tell where one starts and the other ends, and then shoot off in opposite directions.
Their odd song structures are an outgrowth of their guitar perversions. Some, like opener “Thermal Treasure,” are spiky punk songs, like something Richard Hell and the Voidoids may’ve written 15 years earlier, others, like “Stinger (Five Wigs),” rise and fall like a Sonic Youth jam, and still others, like “Lazy Comet” feel like a bunch of disparate ideas crushed together in a trash compactor.
To me, Polvo’s later ‘90s albums felt like they contained too many of the latter type of song, and not enough of the former two. Too many half-formed ideas, songlets, and amorphous noise jams.
And then there’s the Orientalism. Unique among their indie rock peers, Polvo included not only traditionally Indian and Middle Eastern scales in their music, but instrumentation as well. These tracks, especially when they featured the sitar, never felt of a piece with the rest of their dissonant punk rock. I’m certainly not against a little cultural tourism here and there in rock music, but I do think it better rock…which it typically didn’t.
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“Musicians get better as they get older,” my friend Lee of Owosso and FlowLines told me after his most recent show. “”Everyone wants to see bands when they’re up-and-coming…. They’re better later.”
In general, I agree.
While some musicians lose the impulse to create or find that their taste becomes stuck in time, by and large, I’ve discovered older musicians to be more open minded, more skilled, and more able to channel their abilities than their younger peers.
There’s no better example of a band understanding what makes them special and capitalizing on their abilities than Polvo.
Bowie, Brylawski, Steve Popson, and Brian Quast burned off all the excess fat for their reunion albums In Prisms and Siberia. Made of eight songs each, they’ve no space for the genre experiments and half-baked tunes that weighed down the band’s albums in the late ‘90. And they’ve even made the Orientalism gel with their sound (largely by hanging up the sitar).
These albums are all bone, muscle, and blood. Oh, and singing! While Polvo’s lyrics are just as cryptic as I always assumed them to be, they’re actually audible. And, guess what? Bowie and Brylawski have appealing voices!
My favorite track, Siberia’s “The Water Wheel” churns and churns like an Indian raga, cycling five or six riffs and vocal hooks (“The telescope is broken”) over seven minutes before blooming into a gorgeous climax that then decays into a wash of dissonance.
An earlier iteration of the band may have stretched the song past its breaking point or expanded each idea into its own half-baked song, but this more mature version of the band knows what works and what doesn’t. And “The Water Wheel” works perfectly.
Being a young artist is cool because you have all this energy to try out a bunch of different shit. Go ahead, fire up the sitar. If it works, great, that’s another thing you can do. If it doesn’t, well, all you’re out is your time.
But as you get older, you recognize that time is growing shorter, so you only want to spend it doing things that you’re reasonably sure you’ll do successfully. It also means that if you know what you’re good at, you can refine that to its sharpest point. Polvo’s Siberia is a razor.
