Polvo
Today's Active Lifestyles

THE REVIEW

With Today's Active Lifestyles, Polvo develops the ideas showcased in the previous Cor-Crane Secret from an even more experimental angle. Their technique is always to use anomalies and atypical structures while maintaining a purely rock instinctiveness. If in the previous album the dissonances served only to make their accompaniments more original, now they play a key role in the organization of the pieces and have reached a level of extravagance bordering on irrationality. Compared to the past, Bob Weston's production (also bassist of Shellac) makes the sound of the rhythm section and the voice more defined, but it is always the guitars of Bowie and Brylawski that are the protagonists of their bizarre harmonies.
Their style is deliberately ungrammatical, as if they were trying to forget basic technique in order to fly freely with their imagination. What they achieve is an anarchic, intricate sound, free from any ties to rock music in the strictest sense, conceptual and instinctive at the same time.

The album opens with Thermal Treasure, a piece so shabby that it resembles the natural disorder of a barely outlined idea: its jerky progress and drunken guitars make it highly unstable, almost paradoxical in all its strangeness. The same can be said for the following Lazy Comet with its lurching pace, a voice that mimics a chant, and chords with an oriental flavor.
The instrumental for guitars alone, My Kimono, is even more abstract, with Bowie and Brylawski drawing notes so eccentric they seem random. The structures have also become more complex, with continuous mood changes, as in Sure Shot and Gemini Cusp, which almost touch on progressive rock.
The metaphysical side of Polvo is represented here by Stinger, where the rarefied notes of its instrumental tail create an ethereal cosmic landscape. In contrast, in Tilebreaker and Action Vs. Vibe, the chords become more direct and give vent to the more visceral aspect of their sound.

This (ironic) representation of our "active lifestyles today" is an album full of ideas and personality for a group that has made its expressive freedom the starting point for creating a surprising and innovative rock. A full five.