Polvo

Back when guitars were still at the center of the village, let's say roughly between the late Eighties and the first half of the following decade, rock was essentially a matter of electricity, fury and more or less controlled rebellious flashes. At a certain point, it happened that the great American provinces, because it's from the great beating heart of rock that we have to start, had earned the spotlight, proudly displaying treasures once relegated to garages, basements or, at any rate, still limited circuits. In North Carolina, and specifically in the area known as the Triangle, made up of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, several bands, following a strict do-it-yourself ethic, had begun recording demos or 7'' singles, driven by the conviction that the good wind of grunge and its slow but inexorable success would sooner or later make their own flags fly too. With the Seattle scene, these bands, among them Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, Zen Frisbee, Erectus Monotone, Picasso Trigger and Polvo, had practically nothing to do, but it was by now clear to pretty much everyone in the industry that the record business had already cast more than one distracted glance at that underground universe teeming with talent, not, of course, out of any desire to see Art triumph, capital A obviously, but chiefly, and perhaps solely, because it had sensed that piles of money could be made even off complete unknowns, all the better if they had real talent and the right dose of nerve. That's how the same music magazines started sending their bloodhounds into the Triangle area, trying to figure out whether one of those three towns really had the potential to become the "next Seattle".

With hindsight, none of the bands mentioned above would go on to achieve the success and popularity of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains and Soundgarden, just to name the most famous grunge acts, but with the same hindsight it can be said, with no fear of contradiction, that some of them reached top-tier artistic heights, starting with Polvo, whose first three albums are among the best things of that period, with “Exploded Drawning” probably leading the pack, thanks to a perfect balance of noise, melody, experimentation and cohesion. The following lines will be devoted precisely to that double album from the now, alas, distant year of 1996. So get comfortable, and let's begin!

In Chapel Hill (yes, the very town to which Sonic Youth would dedicate a gorgeous, self-titled track on "Dirty"), guitarists Dave Brylawski and Ash Bowie had both grown up dreaming of playing in a band, though the two had come to it very differently: the former had developed slowly, immersing himself from boyhood in that universe of strings and frets while listening to classic rock ("I wanted to imitate Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. At 13 or 14, I wanted to play the blues. I also liked Rush. And Black Sabbath"), while the latter only had his epiphany during his first year of college, thanks to a fateful meeting with Brylawski, with whom he shared a passion for the SST catalogue and for Let's Active, a local band that moved between jangle/power-pop and new wave.

Under the guidance of his more experienced friend (who at the time had his own show on the college radio station), Bowie left behind the grooves of R.E.M. and U2, tuning in instead to plenty of guitar-driven rock from the previous decade, with Hüsker Dü's "Zen Arcade" taking pride of place in his personal pantheon, which also had no small room for the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Indian classical music — the latter discovered not only through guitarist John McLaughlin's band, but also thanks to several bands from the Sixties, with the Beatles leading the pack, of course.

The money spent on that electric guitar, bought at Oxbow Music, on the road between Durham and Chapel Hill — the one that once had "small houses and shops" and today is instead just "a long strip of asphalt" — was, in short, not wasted. Having started relatively late, Bowie's approach to the six-string would always remain more oblique than Brylawski's. He also refused to play covers, proudly defending that choice with the urgent need to find his own path right away! So if a couple of strings broke, he didn't feel obliged to replace them straight away — instead he'd try playing without them, and on top of that he deliberately chose to forgo standard tuning. "I used to leave the strings looser, so they'd produce a buzzing sound, and that's how it all began. At the time, I was really into My Bloody Valentine and the album 'Isn't Anything'. And in my mind, sitting there in my room, those tunings produced this drone sound that I really liked, and I genuinely thought it sounded a bit like My Bloody Valentine. Obviously it didn't, but that's what I wanted it to be."

If the band led by the despotic genius of Kevin Shields is certainly on the radar of anyone who has tried, or will try, to trace the development of noisy, experimental guitar rock starting from the unsurpassed Sonic Youth, there's no doubt that Dinosaur Jr. also had a considerable impact on the Triangle scene: with "You're Living All Over Me" (1987), they had shown that the lesson of "sonic youth" ("Sonic Youth influenced us in many ways," Brylawski would recall, "thanks to them, we learned, for instance, how two guitars can fill space and interact with each other"), filtered through Hüsker Dü's already post-hardcore sound, could be embraced without hiding a possible love for classic rock of the Seventies — which, in practical terms, meant that guitar solos were no longer forbidden and that a certain psychedelic streak could always come in handy.

With fate having set them on a shared path, Brylawski and Bowie recruited bassist Steve Popson and drummer Eddie Watkins, thus kicking off the saga of Polvo. What followed were days of intense, relentless rehearsals aimed at perfecting their chemistry.

The first proof that the two guitarists were excellent students — and already quite original in bending their masters' lessons to connect the dots of their own personality — came in 1990, when their own label, Kitchen Puff Records, released the EP "Can I Ride", featuring songs that spoke a dirty, dissonant, cacophonous language, yet were always steeped in melodic touches and marked by a euphoric torment: at times sounding like Sonic Youth heading straight for the sunset (listen to the coda of "Tread On Me"), at others like a lopsided, caffeine-jittery Television (lend an ear to "Skake Fist Fighter"). It would nonetheless be the single "Vibracobra" — and we're in the unforgettable year of 1991 — that truly put them on the map of the most creative indie rock, stretching their noise-rock out under the aegis of Moore & Ranaldo, as if to say that these grooves often resemble a dream dazzled by scorching storm surges of guitar noise.

The path was now set. Longtime friend Mac McCaughan noticed it too, and signed them to his label Merge, soon after sending them into the studio to record their full-length debut "Cor-Crane Secret" (1992), on which "Vibracobra" and "Can I Ride" shone once again, songs that steer the march toward an oblique, dirty, occasionally disjointed song form that nonetheless remains wonderfully evocative, with the two guitars swapping interchangeably between rhythm and lead. The following, even more convincing "Today's Active Lifestyles" (1993), produced by Bob Weston, would instead toughen up the sound, sharpen its edges and reaffirm its debts not only to the masters of more or less psychedelic noise, but also to the guitar duels of the Cotton/Harkleroad pairing, as shown, for instance, by the arpeggio of "My Kimono", which could be their own "Dali's Car" (from "Trout Mask Replica"), perhaps reimagined in the presence of the ghost of Tom Verlaine.

Across the EPs "Celebrate The New Dark Age" (1994) and "This Eclipse" (1995), Polvo would refine and, in part, tame their sound, before letting it truly explode on the double album "Exploded Drawing" (1996), in which their sonic design (enriched by the return, on production duties, of Bob Weston) bursts, true to the title, in multiple directions, showing that the band had by then not only reinvigorated its own tendencies and influences, but had also transcended them with more polished songwriting and a more deliberate approach to studio work — so much so that, as some have suggested, it's fair to call "Exploded Drawing" their "White Album".

The opener "Fast Canoe" shows that the band had also absorbed the lesson of the most "mathematical" post-rock, patiently carving out a sonic device in which atonality, minimalism, a crooked pop breath and post-hardcore flare-ups all move in lockstep. The impression is of standing before an indeterminate quantity of energy rationally condensed into a scant seven minutes, in which the "fast canoe" of the title is a symbol of help offered to someone far away (a woman?), someone who deserves "a metaphor you might like", even if "I can't find the one you deserve to hear".

Introduced by the droning reverberation of gongs, "Bridesmaid Blues" has the swagger of an anthem to freedom ("Live life in reverse"; "Jump on the bus and leave the farm") and the intellectual grit of Sonic Youth's "Dirty": the guitars charge and discharge electric disenchantment, while "aligned stars burst on high, like a bridesmaid" and impossibly distant horizons fill with wonder, almost as if "Sonderangebot" and "Im Glück" by Neu! had found a bond more emotional than rational.

On "Feather of Forgiveness", Polvo instead play math rock, wielding their instruments with an "industrial" fury best suited to a track whose title is a pun on "Father Of Forgiveness", that is, God as the "Father of forgiveness".

When you asked me what I had in mind

And you said you could keep it to yourself

You lied

Because I have the feeling that you can't

I told you things I should have kept inside

And I know it's my fault because I opened the safe

But I'll never think of you the same way again

I want to cover you in flowers of forgiveness

I want to touch you with the feather of forgiveness

I want to put you under a light that will hurt your eyes

I want to cover you in flowers of forgiveness

After the "Passive Attack" interlude (imagine Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 grappling with Japanese music!), "Light Of The Moon" takes the shape of a drowsy ballad with Pink Floyd at its heart, specifically the "Saint Tropez" strain of Pink Floyd, while the youth turns "sonic" once again on "Crumbling Down", digging into an alternation of neurotic geometries (Steve Albini, is that you?) and dreamy release.

Having amassed a collection of Asian string instruments, Dave Brylawski has fun banging out a dulcimer at the start of "Street Knowledge", which over its remaining minute and a half pushes the noise toward a strange, surreal nightmare, where psychedelia and its arcane revelations lie just around the corner.

How do I know that fate is slow?

I was a worker bee, but now I'm a drone.

The sun is shining and the reflections are sweet.

We hear our voices carried on a breeze of photons.

They go in one ear and out the other.

The voices trail off like the tail of a comet.

They fly through the night with you on my carpet.

Like the summoning of a meteor shower.R

Remembers the city in summer.

You know the streets were alive.

With the sound of the hive.

They don't know it now, if they'd known that song plays forever on the radio

(Knowledge of the road, knowledge)

In its imaginative expansions, wrapped in the usual math-noise explosions, “High-Wire Moves” knocks on the door of the “infinite sadness” of Smashing Pumpkins, suggesting that one must “never forget the way the acrobat learns.” Another interlude follows (the mournful guitar lines of “Monoloth,” set against a sky where menace and mystery are one and the same), and then comes “In This Life,” one of the album's catchiest moments, perfect in its Nineties-style singalong quality, at once jagged and lysergic, backing up a genuine existential reminder: “Don't be ashamed to paint a picture of yourself/ You don't have to make it look the same as someone else's/ In this life, well, you might fall down/ In this life you gotta get back up/ And all you gotta do is assess the situation/ Cultivate alliances, explain the situation/ And this life was made for you/ Seems like you always know just what to do.”

The almost chamber-music elegance of “The Secret's Secret” sketches frontier scenarios as limits of the psyche, preluding “Snowstorm In Iowa,” in which Polvo imagine themselves once again grappling with the recording of “Today's Active Lifestyles,” while “The Purple Bear” brings irony and sarcasm to the table (there's this guy who plays in a band and hopes in vain to see it on TV, even in the dead of night!), sounding like an ungracefully psychedelic slice of power-pop. Despite its breezy attitude, “Taste Of Your Mind” instead boasts one of their most poetic lyrics:

Once we used to count the stars on a clear night

Then, the streetlights made it hard to see

You say there's magic in the submerged constellations

You won't make it magic for me

When we're wandering in the chaos of the city

You just look straight ahead

I want to stop and take a photo of the skyline

You'd rather burn it, instead

Can I bear the weight of your mind?

Can I taste your mind?

Can I climb the hill of your mind?

Can I learn the ways of your mind?

Can I buy the weight of your mind?

Can I try a piece of your mind?

Can I see your mind in its entirety?

Can I see the hole in your mind?

I try to understand that emptiness is a blessing

Even if it doesn't seem to be

After the scant two minutes of "Missing Receipts" (which brings to mind a cross between the title track of "Parable Of Arable Land" and a drowsy guitar rumination), the record goes out in glory with the sprawling "When Will You Die for the Last Time in My Dreams" (just under twelve minutes), which alternates languor and fury, disenchantment and searing torment, digging through the guts of Television, Grateful Dead, the usual Sonic Youth, and the ecstasy of a waking dream that looks more and more like a nightmare.

When you see me wave goodbye

Non ricambiare il saluto

Potrei non sentire il bisogno di spiegare cosa intendo

È una danza pericolosa

Ma se ne avessi la possibilità

Ti porterei ai confini del mondo

È più strano delle storie che scegli

Per il telegiornale della sera

Non sento mai il tuo nome perché lo scrivi tutto da solo

Ai confini del mondo

È un lavoro ben fatto

Ti spareranno per dare un’occhiata al tuo guscio di plastica lucida

Da qualche parte a sud del tuo quartiere

C’è un sapore chimico

Non così lontano dal tuo hotel

La radio sta lanciando un incantesimo

Somewhere south of your border

Can you follow the order

Like an ancient explorer

They recognized your eyes and you still don't know why

When will you die for the last time in my dreams?

 

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29/06/2025