Labels: Gringo
Review by: Joe Caithness
Wow, I have been waiting ages for this! But not as long as most, as Polaris have existed someway shape or form since 1994, which is exactly 12 years ago yesterday infact. Polaris popped up along with a bunch of other bands in the UK to form a really great little style of jangly and erratic post punk and Polaris really took the explosive yet mellow feel of that a step further than their peers – later followed by bands such as Bob Tilton and Baby Harp Seal. They released the amazing and extremely lo-fi “Belated” on an obscure label in the late 90s which showed a brilliant mix of complex build ups and frantic jagged guitars fighting each other. I picked up that long out of print lp on soulseek (file sharing client) off some dude who had every single english emo record in his files, he suggested if I liked Bob Tilton I should definitely download it off him, and that’s where my love affair began.
I listened to Belated so much this year and I discovered a little while ago that Polaris were getting back up to speed and releasing an album on Nottingham based label Gringo, and I was kind of dubious, I wondered how this band which really summed up a certain period of indie rock in the 90s which I love so much would stand up today. My god this stands up well! I was half expecting 7 songs of slow and soft songs, probably just a prejudice against older bands on my behalf, but this CD has really blown me away in many ways. Oh and by the way there are vocals on this album. I picked this up about 2pm today and so far every chance I have to listen to it I have taken. The album opens with a pretty speedy and simple driven tune, guitars doing the same battling between the speakers that I love on their older material, then getting more and more complex, popping back and forth, I am in heaven! The album plods along and slows down a tad and completely drops down in the blissful “Kissing” to a peaceful yet somewhat uncomfortable tone (there is an mp3 of this tune on the Gringo site) and just when the album has taken you down to deep melancholy they hit back probably their catchiest song to date with so many crazy melodic guitar “hammer-ons”. It almost sounds Sam Zurich (Joan of arc) esque. Probably my favourite track is the dark and haunting penultimate number that almost reminds me Indian Summer and uses almost all the dischords that everyone stole (rightfully so!) from Slint in the 90s, coupled with hauntingly soft and delayed vocals. The album climaxes with an eight and half minute epic which has a lot of slide guitar and string bending going on and some really ambient and jazzy sounding drums which spirals off into classic Polaris noodling for a good five minutes.
Absolutley brilliant stuff, I guess I could almost call this one of the best records of 2005, seeing as it came out a day before the end of the year, either way, fucking good album.