album of the week: 12.2

Polysics

eee-P!!!

KRE (2010)

why you'll love it: glitchtastic hi-speed technopop

why you'll have it: Failure to progress from last two albums. bad mixing.

This is a release I've been anxious about all year. Just around this time last December, the synth player of Polysics (my favorite band ever) announced her plans to leave the band. Being a new wave band, this deals a heavy blow. Not only did Kayo contribute vocals to a number of songs, but she controlled almost all of the electronic sequencers, vocoding, keyboards; and provided a good deal of stage antics.

By summer, they were back in the studio again as a trio. Rather than find a replacement for a member many fans deem as irreplaceable, they basically promoted their sequencer. So, in other words, there is now a hard track that the band must follow, providing all the electronic bells and whistles - vocoding too, I think? Or is that something that must be performed live by an off stage 4th person? I don't know. This whole thing confuses me.

It just seems like a very far way to go just to make something that sounds exactly like Absolute Polysics.

I'd like to take a quick detour and diminish some of the criticism I had on that album last year. While I still think it was rushed, that is a tight album. I like it a lot, especially after seeing a lot of the songs performed live earlier this year.

Going into this EP, I was expecting a more stripped down approach. - with a few scattered electronic loops thrown into the middle eights or intros. It hasn't been rare to hear a Polysics song that depends more on guitar and bass than the electronics. Instead, the sequencer is firing at 30 beats per second here, and actually drowning out the rest of the band in songs like "Boil" and "How Are You?" That's crazy to me, that you wouldn't take this opportunity to showcase what kind of awesome hooks you can make with your core instruments. It's frustrating because Yano is actually an incredible drummer, and Hayashi has cooked up some wacky guitar hooks in the past. When I listen to these songs while trying to ignore the sequencer, I can hear some really good bass lines and guitar hooks. Good enough to sustain a song, but they're tough to hear under all the constant chirping.

Maybe these songs are holdovers from the past couple years, and not representative of their next album. None of these songs are bad. Despite the sequencer being way too up front, "How Are You?" is probably their best single in years other than "Young Oh! Oh!". "Mach肝心" is hells of fun to play in Audiosurf. "Rock Wave Don't Stop" is a tame "Electric Surfin' Go Go". Closest thing to a bad track on there. This isn't a bad EP, just a wasted opportunity to reinvent as a trio.