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Purling Hiss

Weirdon

Written by: BV on 26/10/2014 00:38:20

Mike Polizze and his solo project Purling Hiss seems to adore simple minded approaches to the guitar as well as equally simple-minded approaches to songwriting. With last year’s “Water on Mars” Polizze showcased a newfound liking for somewhat polished recording methods as opposed to his very earliest output under the Purling Hiss moniker. At the time I assured myself that it had very little impact on the raw power that Polizze’s simple-minded but utterly devastating guitar-parts usually contain. With this new outing, “Weirdon”, the tendency of leaning towards a polished production seems to have taken over quite a bit, but has also had a noticeable impact on the writing process, it would seem.

At the very first listen, “Weirdon” seems to be the epitome of all the aspects of Polizze’s music fans of him know and love. You’ve got your snarling walls of distortion, strange folk-sensibilities and his noise-jam extremes. “Learning Slowly”, for instance, accentuates this newfound fondness of successful and highly polished genre-blends with its punk n’ roll garage rock attitude, melded with the values of a quite direct pop song. Polizze’s vocals are understandable and reside somewhere between the spoken, the chanted and the mumbled – never really quite reaching the final frontier of Polizze’s descend into highly commercial territory.

In many ways, “Weirdon” is Polizze’s most accessible album yet and there are quite a few simple reasons why. One only needs a few listens through a track like “Another Silvermoon” to be drawn in by the charmingly simple, slightly naïve songwriting tendencies of Polizze, melded with his affinity towards creating endearingly simple sonic pallets and making them work for himself in a way that, albeit bordering on monotony, never gets really tiresome. It should be noted though, that while it never quite grows tiresome, it never quite gets fantastic either. The best description lies somewhere in-between and could possibly be called charming in correct doses – listen to it too much and you’ll easily fall out of love with it, but if you don’t listen enough, you won’t feel any sort of connection to the music either.

So while tracks like “Forcefield of Solitude”, “Another Silvermoon”, “Where’s Sweetboy” and “Learning Slowly” are all nice to be acquainted with, there are still quite a few musical aspects on “Weirdon” that can’t really justify a massive amount of listens, as it’ll get quite tiresome in the long run.

Download: Another Silvermoon, Learning Slowly, Forcefield of Solitude
For The Fans Of: White Fence, Sic Alps, Ty Segall
Listen: facebook.com

Release date 23.09.2014
Drag City