Los Angeles Police Department is a blank sign of a name, a Walmart smiley face, and Ryan Pollie, the 25-year-old who records under it, doesn't provide any hints as to how to read it—there is no detectable whiff of irony in his gorgeous, sleepy songs. If anything, he seems to be hiding behind the moniker, recalling the brief moment, three or four years ago, when indie bands stumbled upon a brief obsession with un-googleable names (Girls, Tennis, Real Estate)—that, or he just finds the name hilarious.
Pollie grew up in Philadelphia but now lives and records in Los Angeles, and his music has the sort of dreamy air that would entertain these sorts of idle fancies. His self-titled debut is a pleasingly rumpled yawn of California pop, ambitious in arrangement and melody and narrow in scope. Most of the richly arranged and spacious songs focus on the ache of being alone or the satisfaction of it. "I let her go and that was wrong," he sings on "She Came Through (Again)", the song title rounding out the story and letting you know that someone important to him is giving him second (or third) chances. "It's happening again, I can be so selfish/ But you're the only one I can be myself with," goes the chorus to "The Only One".
Pollie sings these pretty choruses about alone time in a quiet voice resembling Ira Kaplan's, the kind of plainspoken whisper often associated with public radio announcers. He strums casually, sometimes messily, on an acoustic or a lightly distorted electric, lending the songs on LAPD the sort of just-sitting-around energy that conjured the phrase "bedroom pop" into existence. You can practically shut your eyes and see the chord snaking messily around the bed sheets while he sings from a notebook.
But beneath its rumpled surface, Los Angeles Police Department isn't casual or tossed-off, as Pollie has layered all sorts of detail into his songs, which give away obsessions with painstaking craft. He's an off-handedly excellent musician who seems to be just messing around, even when he's racking up triple word scores. The drafty-ceiling melancholy and watercolor sound of Grizzly Bear's Yellow House is all over LAPD, and the way the song structures braid together like the wicker in an Amish rocking chair would probably impress Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen. "Go Down" is broken down into globular little sections, one of them a toy-marching-band fugue, that tells us Pollie has done some intense Smile studying. On "August 31", where Pollie admits he's "getting tired of my friends," he layers himself into a stacked choir and harmonizes with himself gloriously.
LAPD is less than half an hour's worth of music—it slots neatly into a morning walk, and because it's murmured and low-key, it's easy music to make friends with without over-scrutinizing. It's a first-cup-of-coffee album, the cotton-wispy music played when people are still peeling back filters of consciousness and gathering the wherewithal to join the world again. Gloriously arranged with a late-summer-light country rock haze, LAPD is big shady tree we can sit beneath, shielding us from the real world the same way Pollie's curiously anonymous band name does for him.
