Mike Polizze’s worship of the guitar is so single-minded and unshakeable, at times it approaches Neil Young’s own devotion to the instrument. His long-running project Purling Hiss—which started as a solo affair before being fleshed out into a full band—hasn’t ever particularly sounded like Young’s Crazy Horse, but there’s a similar dynamic at play: one moment Polizze is pouring mud all over his lonesome folk ballads, and the next he’s punching the haywire distortion into noise-jam extremes. Purling Hiss’ most recent full-length, last year’s Water on Mars, was produced by fellow Philadelphian Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs, and it showed a little more discipline and neatness without sacrificing any of Polizze’s prodigious, religious fretwork.
Purling Hiss’ new album, Weirdon, goes even further in that direction, but not by much. It’s tighter and clearer-sounding, but what really makes it stand out is its reconciliation of everything Polizze has dabbled in over the past half-decade. More precisely, Purling Hiss have settled into a sharply defined middle ground: gentle strumming and blown-out heaviness still lurk in the wings, but the sweet spot is punk rock'n'roll. Granted, that still leaves Polizze plenty of room to maneuver, and he does so with lithe agility. “Sundance Saloon Boogie” lays a silly, three-note, clean-toned guitar hook over a jumble of junky riffs; Polizze’s vocals are half chanted, half commanded, and his slop-bucket solo is torn straight from Bob Stinson’s beer-stained playbook. Things are looser on Weirdon’s other punk rippers, including “Learning Slowly” and “Where’s Sweetboy”; the latter is particularly inspired, sapping its energy straight from Raw Power-era Stooges filtered through the Saints’ first album.
Still, this is a contained, controlled album. The leash is stretched to the breaking point on otherwise tranquil “Forcefield of Solitude”, which bears a faint trace of Dinosaur Jr. in Polizze’s narcoleptic drawl. His lyrics don’t amount to much—a spare image here, a catchy incantation there—but they're all served up with unforced melodic ease. It’s a charming approach that works best on “Airwaves”, the album’s hands-down pop gem; with chicken-wire jangle and hokey walking bass propelling him, Polizze kicks on the singsong in a chorus that extolls the virtues of its own ridiculous catchiness. “This is my radio!”, he repeats like a mantra, cramming in an anthem’s worth of joyousness in under a minute and a half. Like the Men’s recent output, “Airwaves” calls to mind the ramshackle, 1980s heyday of SST Records, but its genial twang is more fIREHOSE than Minutemen.
Weirdon doesn’t dwell long on folkier sounds, but when it does, it makes the most of it. "Reptili-A-Genda" oozes ghosts and dissonance, but its psychedelic edges don’t obscure the bluesy haze at its core. For all its upbeat, euphoric outpouring of guitar, bass, and drums, the album retains the solitary, cranky strangeness that made early releases like Purling Hiss and* Dizzy Polizzy* so entrancing. That atmosphere congeals beautifully on “Six Ways to Sunday”, eight minutes of melancholy rumination and overdriven, hideously lovely minor chords, the kind that trawl the pit of your soul if held too long. Polizze doesn’t, though; instead, he submerges and surfaces, a cycle of shadows and sunrise that puts the rest of the album into a similar mood-swinging context. And fittingly enough, the saga-length guitar meltdown—lilting yet monolithic—that meanders throughout “Six Ways to Sunday” sounds eerily like Neil Young at his Crazy Horsiest. Weirdon doesn’t attempt to alter the course or conviction of Polizze’s faith in six strings, a volume knob, and the truth, but it does make it more compelling than ever.
