When bands break up or embark on extended hiatuses, the cumulative effect of all those years away is automatically assumed to be degenerative. Conventional wisdom suggests that the passage of time—and the day jobs, marriages, and diaper changes that often go with it—will inevitably erode the youthful abandon and creative frisson that fuels inspiration, not to mention the aging musician’s physical ability to retain their chops. But since reforming five years ago after a decade of inaction, Chapel Hill indie-rock linchpins Polvo have been getting down to the business of blowing such theories out of the water. Their wholly impressive 2009 comeback effort, In Prism, instead proffered the notion that, when removed from the load-in/load-out drudgery of perpetual van tours, artists are able to reflect, refine, and re-energize—and come out the other side a stronger, more confident, and more intuitive band than ever before. The band’s second post-reformation record, Siberia, drives the point home even further.
Polvo’s improved prowess can be felt in literally the album’s opening seconds. Like a beaten-down lawnmower, the band’s early records needed a few tugs to rev up—think of the many false starts of “Thermal Treasure” on Today’s Active Lifestyles, or the molasses-drip intro of Exploded Drawing’s “Fast Canoe”—as if the band was untangling and reorganizing its intricate strategies in real time. By contrast, Siberia’s introductory salvo, “Total Immersion,” provides just that in an instant—it’s as if we’re joining the band in progress at the precise moment they locked into the song’s powerful riff during hour five of an all-night jam session, with all the sweat and humidity in the room shaken out through the barrelling, handclapped backbeat. But where art-rock forbears like Canfamously distilled their epic improvisation sessions into more manageable pieces, Polvo work the other way, revealing new melodies and motifs in train-like fashion; they’re constantly opening new doors to explore, but in a linear, structured fashion. The real triumph of Polvo’s second phase is how they’ve managed to become a more approachable band without losing their sense of adventure—they can still go from accessible to inscrutable and back in a single chord progression but the shifts feel fluid and predestined rather than spastic and impulsive. Their songs have come more sprawling, but their albums on the whole have become tighter and more focused and, in the case of the breezy but byzantine "Blues Is Loss", they have an uncanny knack for making a seven-minute song feel more like three.
Siberia is very much a sister album to In Prism, adopting its predecessor’s eight-song, four-to-a-side composition and even its sequential trade-offs between hot-wired rockers and psychedelicized excursions. But within these set parameters, the band continually surprise—in the extended fadeout to spectacular centerpiece track “The Water Wheel” alone, there’s enough new passages introduced in 90 seconds to spawn another record. Just when you think “Total Immersion” is about to dissolve in a dub-fuzz quicksand, its central riff suddenly reemerges like a rescue team leading you back to safety; and just as you’ve adjusted your ears to the high-beam synths (!) that drive the chorus of “Light, Raking", you’re hit with a twinned, harmonic guitar solo straight out of the Brian May/Thin Lizzy playbook.
These subtle classic-rock quotes—like the “Tom Sawyer”-worthy arpeggio that underpins the tranquil “Changed”—serve to make Polvo’s complex guitarchitecture more inviting to the uninitiated, but what really makes Polvo 2.0 an especially enticing proposition is Ash Bowie and Dave Brylawski’s more emotionally revelatory approach to their vocals. Polvo’s 90s-era output didn’t necessarily shy away from pop melody, but you often had to cut through the band’s barbed-wire discord to get at it. Siberia puts the hooks—and lyrical ruminations on passion versus reason—further out front than even In Prism, to take full advantage of their ageless but increasingly expressive voices: the deceptively serene prog-folk reprieve “Old Maps" acquires the spectral melancholy of Elliott Smith, while the punchy power-pop of “Some Songs” will satisfy that rogue faction of first-album Foo Fighters fans who wish Dave Grohl would’ve continued down the winsome, jangly path of “Big Me” rather than cranking up the stadium-grunge ballast. Fifteen years ago, it would’ve been strange to be speak of Polvo in relation to such noted melody-makers, but at this stage in their career, crafting pop songs is as much an experiment for Polvo as piecing together multi-sectional avant-rock odysseys. And what makes Siberia so great is that it thoroughly succeeds on both counts—proving once again that, for Polvo, all those years out of the game are to be measured not in inspiration lost, but wisdom gained.
