Polvo - Guitar Weaving for a Kung-Fu Movie

It's not the first time it's happened… dazzling, luminous bands from the US underground that cross paths with, and brush up against, the history of rock music like meteors, then suddenly vanish, and within a few years, without anyone noticing, fall into the dark, forgotten corners of music fans' memories.

Polvo are one of those bands, and perhaps one of those whose loss tugs hardest at the heart. Seven years of activity, four albums and a couple of EPs, after which the members lose touch with each other and vanish into thin air, with no clear sense of where to find traces of their legacy. Then a familiar guitar sound pops up, maybe on a track from a project like Loose Fur — the side activity of giants like Jim O'Rourke and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco — and you realize that perhaps Polvo too left something behind for those who came after. Part of a prolific scene in North Carolina in the early '90s (Superchunk, Seam, Archers of Loaf), Polvo were formed in 1991 in Chapel Hill as a classic college-rock band, with Ash Bowie and Dave Brylawski on guitars, and a rhythm section made up of Steve Popson (bass) and Eddie Watkins (drums).

Even the first singles immediately laid out the coordinates of the sound to come: disorderly rock, forcefully steered toward noise and the metallic tones of guitar distortion, following the teachings of indie-rock masters like Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth. But the band didn't settle for simply rehashing earlier models. Their guitar interplay already had a clearly defined identity of its own, with off-key, fractured, jagged sounds that in some ways updated the lessons of Television in a noise setting. A certain taste for melodies vaguely bordering on psychedelia, plus an obsession with the imagery of '70s kung-fu movies, rounded out the picture.

Their debut album, Cor-Crane Secret (Merge, 1992), is a splendid collection of tracks devoted to tearing apart the very notion of the song form. It opens straight away with the magnificent "Vibracobra" (already featured on their earliest singles), a trembling harmony of guitars that drift apart before being swept up by a relentless rhythm section, marking one of the high points of their noisy experimentalism. The record thrives on a reckless love for scruffy, dirty sounds: "Can I Ride" echoes the submerged melodies of Dinosaur Jr; the instrumentals "Kalgon" and "Duped" show off their skill with eccentric arrangements, as does the magnificent emotional rise and fall marked by the restarts of "Bend or Break", with its vaguely sixties-garage flavor. All in all it's a dazzling debut, where perhaps only the vocals suffer in the face of such an overwhelming guitar sound.

With a master like Bob Weston brought in to produce, and buoyed by a record that had already shown their worth, Polvo matched and then surpassed themselves with Today's Active Lifestyles (Merge, 1993). Sharpening the jagged edges of their guitars and leaning further into metaphysical stretches, Polvo found their own path, definitively shedding any cumbersome points of reference. The atonal guitar that opens the first track, "Thermal Treasure", is already a trademark. Bowie's and Brylawski's guitars wrestle with each other until they collapse into a vortex of noise, always magnificently backed by drums and bass. "Lazy Comet" twists a light melody, drilling it full of metallic jolts; the two-and-a-half-minute guitar instrumental "My Kimono" stands as their "theoretical" manifesto, with two guitars, loosely out of tune, weaving a golden, gleaming, noisy fabric embroidered with oriental, b-movie flourishes.

The most classically rock track — as much as one can speak of classic sounds with Polvo — "Tilebreaker" nails the right melody and an irresistible riff. Then there are the zany digressions of "Shiska" and "Time Isn't On My Side". But the true masterpieces are the two long jams and stretched-out instrumentals of "Stinger" and the closing "Gemini Cup" (both over seven minutes), which revive the glories of certain '60s psychedelia: long, hallucinated, fractured, stuttering passages, splendid examples of their ability to build complex, carefully reasoned structures without ever lapsing into mannerism for its own sake.

The EPs Celebrate The New Dark Age (Merge, 1994) and This Eclipse (Merge, 1995) carry forward and refine the path they'd set out on, also showing affinities with the post-rock sounds then taking their first steps (listen to the instrumental "Title Track", from This Eclipse: it almost sounds like the more cerebral side of June of '44).

Polvo returned to the long-player format with Exploded Drawing (Touch&Go, 1996) — which also marked their move to a highly prestigious label, Touch&Go, again with Weston at the helm — finding a balance between the fractured, broken-up sounds of their earlier records and melody, helped along by sharper vocal harmonies. The opening track is itself exemplary, immediately laying its cards on the table: "Fast Canoe" is an intermittent melody carefully sketched out by the guitars, a constant stopping and starting, a steady, hypnotic wave motion. The following "Bridesmaid Blues" immediately raises the stakes again and, after an overwhelming start, dissolves into an acidic, hallucinogenic coda. Then there's the rock drive of "Feather Or Forgiveness" and "Crumbling Down", the fake, transfigured pop of "The Purple Bear" and "Taste of Your Mind"; the wild, unmistakable guitar riffs on tracks like "In This Life" and "Snowstorm In Iowa". But it's the whole album that advances their musical language, an utterly original collage made of sharp blades slicing through any conventional sonic matter. Every track thrives on brilliant, unpredictable inventions, and the closer, the twelve-minute "When Will You Die For The Last Time In My Dreams", is both a summation and a transcendence of everything Polvo had managed to create throughout their career. The tattered melody of Ash Bowie's anguished voice, screaming to overcome the metallic clatter, the mad restarts followed by delicate guitar filigree, right up to the endless final instrumental digression that broadens the noise-psychedelic shades of their hyper-structured sound.

After this record, one of the hidden masterpieces of the '90s, Polvo returned a year later with Shapes (Touch&Go, 1997). By this point, though, the band already seemed on the verge of collapsing in on itself, with drummer Eddy Watkins replaced by Brian Walsby, and Brylawski increasingly drawn to oriental influences. The album arguably leans further into their more psychedelic, mystical side; the sound is generally hazier and more polished, less inclined toward chaos, as shown by the opening "Enemy Insect"; the interludes played on traditional Eastern instruments, already present on Exploded Drawing, now become more pervasive. The peaks are to be found in the splendid psychedelic melody of "Downtown Dedication", bolstered by a tex-mex-style trumpet; "Rock Post Rock" and "Everything In Flames" reckon with the band's past and hold up remarkably well by comparison. In some ways it's a wonderful album when it nails its acid, hallucinogenic melodies and structures (the closing "Lantern"), but overall it feels too uneven and disjointed.

Certainly proof of a band uniquely skilled at constantly renewing and reinventing itself, Shapes could have been the prelude to something even more accomplished, to be refined on albums yet to come. The band would split up after the obligatory tour, without leaving a trace.

Just when the story of Polvo seemed definitively buried by the passing years, and their music had become little more than one of the most shining memories — albeit unfairly overlooked — of the golden decade of American alternative rock, Ash Bowie and Dave Brylowski found themselves reunited at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in 2008. They were joined by a new drummer, Brian Quast, and together the three of them quickly laid the groundwork for a stunning comeback.

So, a full twelve years after Shapes, Polvo surprisingly return to record a new album: In Prism sees the light of day in 2009.

For the Chapel Hill band, time really does seem to have stood still, since the new record feels like a pick-up of a conversation that had remained alive and present, never really interrupted despite such a long gap: in a sense, Ash Bowie and his bandmates fire up the time machine, releasing a record that could easily have slotted in as a direct continuation of their earlier work.

In Prism indeed delivers much of what one could still legitimately expect from Polvo (angular guitars, rhythmic fragmentation, more or less “post”-tinged slow-downs), with the added sense of a “classic” feel stemming not just from the years gone by but above all from the new emphasis on cleaner sounds, now veering into a subtle psych-prog vein, now seeming almost to pay homage to the sacred monsters of 60s and 70s rock.

The result is an album that doesn't sound out of context simply because of the band's pedigree, but that ultimately doesn't scratch much beneath its surface either. There are still incandescent electric dialogues, and claustrophobic deconstructions surface at various points on the record, appreciable for anyone who passionately followed the golden age of American rock in the nineties: what's missing, however, is both the freshness needed to give the songs effective structures, and the bite capable of real impact, too often diluted through a one-note drum sound and guitars that all too often moan with an almost languid regularity.

The band's unchanged skill still manages to deliver a few flashes of their former glory, even if the occasionally excessive sprawl of the tracks tends to dilute the surviving feverish moments scattered throughout the album more than necessary. A case in point is the nearly nine-minute “A Link In The Chain”, which closes the record showing a worrying parallel with late-period Sonic Youth, as well as psych leanings and unexpected prog echoes, from which overall emerges a 2009 Polvo more drawn toward rock's grand classics than toward a consequential development of the artistic and cultural roots from which they originally sprang.

Four years after In Prism (Merge Records, 2009), following their 1998 breakup and 2008 reunion, Polvo return with Siberia, mixed by the skilled hands of Brian Paulson (Slint, Wilco, Superchunk) and Mitch Easter (Rem, Pavement).

The producers split the album's tracks exactly down the middle: the acidic, distorted musical prelude of "Total Immersion" declares warlike intent (Paulson); while from the second track onward Polvo stretch out, delivering dazzling interlocking riffs and arpeggios somewhere between psychedelia and math-rock with a few echoes of the East, perhaps that place where "Blues Is Loss" (Easter). The Eastern sonorities return in "Ancient Grains" and in "Anchorless", whether acoustic or saturated, especially in the record's final stretch, repeated like a hypnotic mantra and broken only by the drums at the close.

An album of meditations, of countless listens absorbed and reworked into a personal, recognizable brand of rock. A few guitar flashes bring us back to their influences, like Dinosaur Jr. in "Light, Raking" (“It’s no joke when you’re chasing the bus/ growing older in a college town”) before opening up into instrumental digressions almost comparable to Queen (“Clarity may come when it’s too late to care/ always a light, raking through a summer sky”). Just when you think you're listening to something familiar or "already heard", Polvo suddenly take you into different territory altogether, whether that of American rock or of psychedelia.

There's a lot going on in the head with Siberia. The multi-handed production is masterful and, overall, perhaps a bit too eclectic. The record demands repeated listens to fully appreciate its refinement, but emotionally it leaves you somewhat at a loss. We would have liked a few more unruly moments like "Total Immersion" to occasionally shake up an album so meticulously constructed.

Contributions by Raffaello Russo (“In Prism”) and Maria Teresa Soldani (“Siberia”)

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