Polvo
Exploded Drawing

The Polvo from Chapel Hill, a town in North Carolina "home" to a fierce indie scene (Superchunk, Unwound), play experimental noise rock that is curious in sound without being clumsy, precise in metrics yet dispersive when listening, punk in attitude but elliptical and complex in writing. It's a challenging rock, a bit introverted, seemingly playful only at first glance. The harmonic oddities and atonalities that form its shell hide an urgency, an emotional tension that is never openly expressed, but hits deep in albums like the second one, "Today's Active Lifestyles," where even the most foolishly dissonant episodes have a hermetic aftertaste of sadness and estrangement, like painting the heroic-comic attempt of a court jester to save himself from the gallows. In that album, Polvo then shows a strong dislike for canonical forms (and tunings, of course), preferring open musical structures with a profusion of repetitions and circularity of riffs, as in a vague post-rock with a punk aesthetic (most of the instrumental "tails" to the tracks are magnificent).

This "Exploded Drawing" however denotes greater attention to songwriting, certainly less atypical, but wonderfully expressive as in the opener "Fast Canoe," a track with a broad breath but classic syncopated and atonal pace, varied in mood, or in the very square "Feather of Forgiveness," intense and immediately engaging. A long album, broken by several interludes where Oriental instrumentation sometimes peeks in, which will have much more relevance in the last "Shapes," this (double) LP shows a mature group, capable of composing elaborate songs, with frequent mood changes, yet very geometric and serial in structure, "epic" in their own way (listen to "Crumbling Down," the splendid "High Wire Moves" and the 11-minute epic of the concluding "When Will You Die For The Last Time in My Dreams"), with the joke of "The Purple Bear" (an indie bubblegum with somewhat British tones played in the Polvo style) to lighten the tones, along with the more straightforward "In This Life."

The guitar expressionism is more channeled and subservient to the needs of the tracks, making this platter more accessible to the "uninitiated." Perhaps it disappoints someone who expected a more "vertical" evolution, but it still retains the singular personality of a band that is, in my opinion, among the most interesting and enjoyable of the '90s.