Purling Hiss’s Mike Polizze came of age in the 1990s, a time when indie and underground shared space with classic rock on radio and TV– after “punk broke” and before the crash of the majors. And Purling Hiss's Weirdon represents what happens when ‘80s and ‘90s underground rock becomes internalized as a set of conventions, and gets recombined with familiar staples of the first wave of classic rock.
Almost 30 years after You’re Living All Over Me and Daydream Nation, no one can knock Polizze’s deployment of the musical techniques of the Our Band Could Be Your Life-era. Weirdon does not sound like a nostalgic repetition, nor does it photocopy any one band’s sound. In fact, Polizze is mining one of the few seams left open to rock musicians: the refinement of the heavier side of underground guitar. On the one hand, electronic and dance music is finally getting the attention it deserves in the US with a genuinely committed community of fans; on the other, upper middle class professionals are consuming more and more lightweight fare inexplicably calling itself rock, punk and/or experimental. In this situation, Purling Hiss manage to make rock that sounds immediate, powerful and concentrated.
It’s as if the structural pieces of indie have been isolated and combined into a more concentrated, immediate and catchier form. In this, Polizze plays a similar role Jay Reatard did to Memphis garage, as a refiner and craftsman, adding hooks, structure, and a hint of polish here and there. The record’s first three songs epitomize this tendency, each one a dense rocker (“Forcefield of Solitude,” “Sundance Boogie Salon” and “Learning Slowly”) which packs a lot into its short running time. The most successful of the slower songs, “Another Silvermoon” anomalously sounds like a lost Wrens song, and is followed by a middle set that gets a little bogged down in genre exercises. But Weirdon ends on a high note with the intense “Six Ways to Sunday,” a Crazy Horse-inspired, 7-minute stomper.
Polizze’s lyrics combine scraps of sayings, commonplace phrases (“Six Ways to Sunday/Eight Days a Week”) with simple statements and narrative vignettes. The words are unpretentious and unobtrusive. This allows Polizze to bend his voice around his expressive guitar playing; the result is not jumbled nonsense, but rather the expression of basic emotions in a pliant musical form. “It’s the end of the time/it’s about 6 p.m./I don’t know where I am,” goes a line from “Sundance Boogie Salon,” demonstrating his method– the grandiose replaced with the modest and anti-lyrical. Reverb and multi-tracked vocals sweeten the sound, and Polizze’s voice is warm but controlled. His slightly nasal voice is strong enough to match the band’s volume without histrionics or retro affectation.
Weirdon shows where the Drag City label stands in the underground rock marketplace — finding a larger crowd than avant noise, yet equally distant from the sort of lifestyle rock that would slip easily into commercials. While many of its long-running peers have gone under or lost the plot, records like this show why they’ve lasted. Purling Hiss’s rough but accessible rock, made with craftsmanship and taste, does a difficult thing. It pleases old indie-heads just as easily as it can draw in the new kids.
