Amazing Records That Sound Incredible: Polvo, Celebrate the New Dark Age (Merge, 1994)
Discovering this record for a huge deal for highschool-age me: it was the weird, and I liked it; thus I was weird, and that was fine. The all-guns-blazing psychedelic strangeness of “Fractured” and “Every Holy Shroud” were what did it for me then. I still love them, but the delicate, shimmering uncanniness of “City Spirit” and “Virtual Cold” are what have kept me coming back for the last thirty years. This remains a lost classic of 90s indie rock. Strange tunings, loud-quiet, a genuine fuck-everything willingness to experiment… we’ve gotten used to all that in Sonic Youth or whoever over the years, but it still feels surprising here, like digging up a living corpse. Polvo were and are geniuses / Ash Bowie is a hero.
My “Amazing Records that Sound Incredible” methodology mandates I only pick records that fill both criteria, and this one is more “amazing” than “incredible,” but it does sound quite excellent… and surely the TRIPLE SEVEN-INCH format gets this one in purely as an example of over the top vinyl purism. I always did dream of doing a 3×7”…