Review Summary: Trippy mane
Whether you love Ariel Pink or want him burnt in an acid vat, few can argue that his approach to attacking the jams of yesteryear is not unique. Ariel Pink takes music that is pristine and meticulously crafted and mangles it just enough that it’s still vaguely recognizable. Hiding behind every early Ariel Pink song there is a trace of some yacht rock or new wave song that you can’t quite put a name to, buried underneath the lo-fi gauze and the kooky sound effects and what not. Lo-fi deconstructionism is thrilling for exactly this reason; it’s music that is familiar to us from the radio and our parents, but broken down and dissolved into a form that explores how we associate sounds from different eras.
Purling Hiss is the brainchild of guitarist Mike Polizze, a former member of Philadelphia jam legends Birds of Maya. For those not familiar with them, Birds of Maya’s two albums essentially sound like Funhouse recorded with a potato. Polizze anchored these 10 minute plus Stoogesesque jams with his guitar heroics, noodling away on these grainy recordings like some sort of lo-fi Jimmy Page. Following his departure from Birds of Maya, Polizze recorded two albums of epic bedroom jams (Purling Hiss and Hissteria). These albums closely mirrored his work in Birds of Maya but gave Polizze free reign over the jamming, pushing the music to longer and trippier extremes.
Public Service Announcement is the anomaly of the Purling Hiss discography. On this album Polizze styles himself equal parts Neil Young and noise provocateur. While Ariel Pink’s music siphons from a gold mine of 70’s soft rock and commercial ditties, Polizze finds his muse in classic rock radio, resurrecting the gentler side of dinosaur rock. Stripped of its production values, Public Service Announcement might just come off as some half-assed recycling of songs your grandpa listens to in the car. Fortunately, the extremely low standards of production on this album works in Polizze’s favor and give the album the feel of a collage of musical memories.
When I say extremely low standards of production I mean it. This thing pushes the boundaries of fidelity; I truly feel bad for these master tapes, god knows what kinds of torture and abuses they subjugated to while under Polizze’s possession. The music warps as you listen to it, changing pitch and cutting off when you least expect it. Then there’s that queasy flanger effect that runs throughout the course of the album; it’s all quite disorienting. On opener “Run From the City”, Polizze sings like he is 1000 leagues under water, his vocals faintly buzzing over his fiery guitar leads. It is a charming slice of AM radio rock, channeling Thin Lizzy and Guided by Voices at the same time. There are little gems like this scattered all throughout the course of the album, including the earworm folk pop of “Don’t Even Try It” and the hazy country shuffle of “Goodbye Blue”. The guy has quite an ear for hooks; just listen to “Beautiful Earth Creature” and try to get that melody out of your head…you won’t.
The sound experiments and instrumentals are hit and miss. “Porch Dude/Slight Return” is a classic Polizze jam that plays like something off Hissteria, and the brief “Bedroom” throws the listener a curveball, sounding like a long lost Van Halen single before cutting off without any semblance of a warning. The wispy charm of instrumentals like “Ojos Locos” and “Gypsy” are lost when Polizze goes off on ambient noise collage tangents like “Malice in Wonderland” and “1976”. The former is painful to listen to; buzzsaw guitar feedback warping for five and a half minutes, while the latter closes the album on an underwhelming note with repetitive synth washes and drum rolls.
Public Service Announcement is an album that can easily fade into the background if you’re not engaged all the way through. Polizze touches upon a lot of great ideas but doesn’t thoroughly expand on them, cutting songs off abruptly or letting other songs go on for too long. The scattershot nature of the songwriting of Public Service Announcement actually adds to the experience of the album rather than detract from it; PSA is what the 70’s sound like in Polizze’s head, with memories of Free, Bad Company, and The Steve Miller Band swirling around in a psychedelic haze, fading in and out of each other. Like Ariel Pink, Purling Hiss regurgitates the past, but in a way that questions the relationship we have with music from yesteryear and our often hazy, skewed recollections of it.
BEST TRACKS:
Run From the City
Don't Even Try It
Goodbye Blue
Beautiful Earth Creature
