Kelley Polar
I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling
There's a sort of graphic immediacy to Polar's 2008 album, his second. It's not the sort of immediacy that a listener finds in the speed-metal shotgun blast that Meshuggah put out this year--this is an easily described dance album, make no mistake--but there's still an aspect of Sky Is Falling that's just as insanely over-the-top, that jumps out even in the first track "A Feeling Of The All Thing." That opener...well, it's a veritable diagnostic check for prospective listeners: vocoder vocals of Polar constantly repeating stuff like "There's a special sensation" and "You can feel the earth moving underneath your feet", while a twanging bass line pulled from a 70's blaxplotiation film and then jacked up as heavy as your woofer can handle, layered over a choir of (female? probably Polar) voices start tuning up, probably to sing about God or something, we never find out; all of this, only to introduce you to excruciatingly defined synth pops and Midi-sounding keyboards while Polar gets ready to show off his Julliard-trained violist skills. This, this right here: are you ready for this? This is what it's going to be like--every big, massive part of music (with the exception of an opera singer) is going to come into play, but it's going to be in the service of an album that doesn't want you to do much more than fantasize about world-building New Age type philosophizing while dancing your way into chlamydia. Songs like the bald-faced "Chrysanthemum", an ode to nonsense in the form of a bass soundtrack to the thrusting of an erect penis--this is stuff that doesn't pull any punches. The production values of cleaning and refining the synthesized tones are so far crystallized into sharp edged blades designed to re-make the listener into little more than a vehicle for movement: Polar isn't interested in whether you can dance, whether you want to, or even if you like what he's doing--he's trying to make your brain respond on a level beyond your control.
One of the stand out tracks on the album, "Entropy Reigns (In The Celestial City)," might serve as the closest indication of what Polar wants to do--at an almost five minute run-time, it's a bit long for a single, even more so when you notice how little space he leaves between his vocal duet with Clare de Lune. There's no room for breathing here, no time to stop and wonder why your head hurts or what it was you just took--it's a frantic, overstuffed piece of 2008 disco that doesn't have time for the listener's petty concerns. Spiraling into fade-out on the flight of Polar's string work and the sound of him and de Lune's chanting "over and over again", the song is one of an artist who is clearly interested in the same sort of landscape song construction that artists like M83 created this year, he's just not willing to let go of his obsession with making sure that the dance freaks of the 21st still know what it feels like to be John Travolta as well.
It's a difficult construct, sure--the music is so graphic, so lacking in subtlety, that at times it's a shout out to something that might have come out of the bedroom of a precocious 15-year-old boy--but that doesn't make it any less magnificent. Odd, yes. But there was very little music this year that remembered the age-old truism that most artist aren't very good, and certainly aren't smart enough, to pull off educating the populace on changing the world. Often, the solipsism of the modern artist--the inherent selfishness required to navigate the torturous scope of business-based marketing that their industry has become--is best served when a guy just decides he's going to make music for junkies to play while they fuck each others sweaty bodies. Whether that's what Kelley wanted or not, that's what he created: something to play that will get you ready to cover yourself in oil before taking a slippery cock into your mouth. If it doesn't sound like something that came from a Crotian born, elite school trained violist, well--it isn't supposed to. It's supposed to sound like you're trying not to cum. Every once in awhile, that can be the best part.
-Tucker Stone, 2008
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