|palimpsests of swelter beneath a new temperate regime|
My general conception of great nineties guitar-based alternative music is indelibly centralized around Polvo, a band formed in 1990 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Polvo’s earliest recordings consist of fairly unabashed, aggressive, mathy post-punk (check out 1993’s Today’s Active Lifestyles for a sprawling distortional romp), while its output in later years saw the band cross-fade its former ideas with approaches more proggy and Eastern-tinged before its break-up in 1998.
This specific track is the closer off of the band’s excellent In Prism, the 2009 reunion album, which I was hesitant to approach. Turns out that that fear was unfounded, since this plays not so much as a backward-glancing money-grabber as a series of long-churning ideas pensively pressed. The album, produced by the great Brian Paulson, is out on Merge Records.
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