Early year favorites

Not much going on today either music or workwise, so I thought I'd take a few minutes to recap my favorite records of 2013 so far...don't hold me to the order, BTW.  I haven't thought about it that hard yet.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Push the Sky Away...Not anywhere near as loud and funny and entertaining as the Grinderman records, but I don't know how to say this and make it sounds positive...insidious. It just sort of seeps into your consciousness and takes up a dark slippery residence there. Bleak, gorgeous, doomed, desolate...wonderful stuff.  I like "Water's Edge" the best, but it's all pretty wonderful.



Waxahatchee, Cerulean Blue This year's amazing new female voice belongs to Katie Crutchfield...I went to a certain amount of trouble trying to describe it in my Dusted review, so it's just crib from there:

Katie Crutchfield’s voice is the kind of thing you love for its flaws, for the gusts of breath that blow in when she reaches for a high note, for the earnest crack when she goes for volume, for the catch in her throat that sounds like it hurts a little, though not enough to stop her from confiding, whispering urgently about life and love and obstacles. Even here, on a second album amped and distorted with rock instruments, Crutchfield sounds casual, private and unstudied. You feel like you’re eavesdropping on a phone call to a sister (maybe Crutchfield’s twin, Allison, of the also excellent Swearin’), as she mutters, rasps and croons. Her observations are poetic, but also rawly specific, like ideas she’s jotted down, worked on but not fussed over, after a fight with her parents or a slightly-off connection with a boyfriend.

Also loved Purling Hiss' Water on Mars, a surprisingly dead on, third-time's the charm iteration of Mike Polizze's blown-out yet tuneful aesthetic. I said:

Public Service Announcement looked at first like an identity crisis, like the work of a guy who couldn’t figure out what he wanted to be or do. Now, with Water on Mars it seems more like a jumping-off point, maybe even a straw man argument to help Polizze sharpen his evolving vision. Look at Polizze’s progression as thesis (Purling Hiss), anti-thesis (Public Service Announcement), and synthesis (Water on Mars). Polizze is making a powerful case for balancing guitar chaos with songs.

That just leaves Kinski's weirdly titled, awesome new album Cosy Moments, which I have played the crap out of and still LOVE, LOVE, LOVE...let's see if there's a video.  No, dammit, no video, so you'll have to listen to "Conflict Free Diamonds" again.; It could be worse..

Guitar!!! (Purling Hiss)

I've been on a roll with guitar-centric albums lately...reviewed Kinski yesterday (awesome, more later) and today Dusted is running my Purling Hiss review.

Purling Hiss
Water on Mars
Drag City

Purling Hiss, the guitar-squalling offshoot of Birds of Maya’s Mike Polizze, first caught most people’s attention with a roiling, overdriven self-titled album put out by Permanent Records in 2009. Tracks like “Almost Washed My Hair” nudged at the intersection of noise and hard-rock anthemry, with the distortion and feedback pushed to the foreground, the vocals nearly buried in volcanic chaos. Hissteria, released a year later, continued in the same promising vein, all stomp and churn and obliterating amplification.


Yet, Polizze also unveiled Public Service Announcement, an older experiment in folky melody and acoustic strumming, more like sometime touring partner Kurt Vile than Comets on Fire or Hawkwind. It was at least a confusing move, and maybe a confounding one. Ben Donnelly, reviewing Public Service Announcement for Dusted, closed this way: “If the word-of-mouth continues, this will be the record where the conversation goes: ‘Well, I heard this one album, and I don’t get what the fuss is about.’ ‘If it’s the one where the guy on the cover is sitting, you gotta hear the other ones.’”


Listening to Water on Mars, however, I’m not so sure PSA was a significant detour. This fourth Purling Hiss album takes a lot of what was exhilarating about the self-titled and Hissteria and adds some structure and melody. It bridges the considerable distance between Purling Hiss and Public Service Announcement -- and, in the process, improves on both. The hard stuff (“Water on Mars,” “Lolita”) is easier to parse. The soft songs have significantly more spine.

More

Purling Hiss...damn

I've got a little piece up in Philly Weekly's Music Issue this week about Mike Polizze who more or less is Purling Hiss and also plays guitar in Birds of Maya. I'm trying this new thing where I start with a quote, like Mojo always does, and it's harder than it looks.

Like this:

“I wanted to do something ridiculous and over the top, recording in the red with the gain all the way up,” says Mike Polizze, explaining the guitar mayhem that defined Purling Hiss’ self-titled debut.

A veteran of Philly’s psych boogie monolith Birds of Maya, Polizze began his solo project as a way to use up ideas that didn’t quite fit into the other band’s aesthetic. There are subtle differences between the two outfits, he says, if anything this magnificently loud and distorted can be said to be subtle.

The whole story is here.

Let's see what have we got for Purling Hiss media...

Do you believe it? just the Myspace.


But hold on, just play "Almost Washed My Hair" once on your crappy little computer speakers and tell me if it does not absolutely rule.

It does.

More coming soon, on Richie Records and Woodsist, stay tuned.