Sandro Perri must be both flattered and frustrated by the repeated comparisons he receives to Wolfgang Voigt. It at once legitimizes him an electronic artist-- as Voigt's Gas project is a hyper-subtle, quasi-ambient territory hardly traversed, let alone traversed well-- yet also relegates him to second fiddle: perhaps he's mentioned as a contributor to the genre, but possibly never without the connection to his predecessor.
Of course, there's no mistaking the similarity: both work within the context of slowly unraveling drone compositions with liberal flourishes of natural sound, conflating mid-range white-noise hiss with a heavy rhythmic pulse. Both prefer drawn-out pieces, rarely settling for less than five minutes of (to over-generalize) a single looped figure, though each commands attention, be it with suddenly emergent melodies or the sheer hypnotic trance that skips past pop entirely. For lack of an NME-supplied genre categorization, Gas and Polmo Polpo share stock in "orchestral noise."
Like Hearts Swelling shows Polmo Polpo in evolution from his 2002 Alien 8/Subtractif-released debut, The Science of Breathing; its updated modus operandi fits nicely with his switch to Montreal's Constellation label, where Perri shares poster space with similarly grandiose acts Do Make Say Think and A Silver Mt. Zion. Here, delving barely nil into The Science of Breathing's darker four-to-the-floor dominance (a progression in style that ironically draws him even closer to Gas), Perri now breaks through his loops with moody slide guitar. The instrument's necessarily rustic attitude dramatically differentiates the album: the blankets of distrust and melancholy that beautifully asphyxiated his previous offering are all but completely absent; what remains is hope, unspoken at each track's silent beginning, burgeoning and empowering by each track's end.
"Romeo Heart" evokes an airplane on the runway, its cold engines spinning humbly but enough to manifest the cozy harmonics nestled inside the song's single-tone whirl. Then Perri's siren-like slide guitar takes over controls, guiding the track through stratums after stratums of atmospheric noise. As the track closes, it expertly mimics the Doppler effect's drop in apparent pitch, bestowing the drone track-- composed vertically-- with an unusually compelling forward motion.
The eleven-minute "Requiem for a Fox" finds Perri at his most versatile, indulging everything from typical drone exercises to more slide guitar overlays to, at its end, a Manitoba-like electro-acoustic psychedelia. There's less technical forward motion to the track, but the metamorphosis that takes place at its conclusion is among the album's most compelling: the echoed train-like pulse slowly gives way to a focused rhythmic punch as Perri treats his guitar to a delicious vibrato. As the bass and pulse lock up for a tight driving finale, they cast the track in bronze as the album's clear standout.
"Farewell" carries over the acoustic infatuation heard at the end of "Requiem", but Perri slowly and deliberately undermines its bucolic hee-haw, subsuming its ashes into a drone of increasingly sputtering vibrato and the slide guitar's nightingale song. It's only fitting that, having ended each drone so masterfully and completely, Perri ends the album with its title track, which summarizes the album's scope in instrumentation and approach, successfully incorporating accordion and proper stringed instruments into the album's established aesthetic as though they'd been there all along. And so, what could have come off as Like Heart Swelling's novelty track becomes instead its most properly integrated creation, a final memento of what Polmo Polpo has so carefully accomplished here: perfectly unstructured, structured sound.
