mackro wrote:Both bands bowed out with excellent albums... Shapes and Leaves Turn Inside You are both their respective best albums ever, despite being relative departures for each.

Today's Active Lifestyles is Polvo's best album. Shapes was a departure all right, but not a good one. Some have claimed to have the balls to make a serious defense of Shapes, but they never do.

Have any balls.

At all.

Nothing in the sac, no sir.

Or defend Shapes.

Get dog costumes wrote:Today's Active Lifestyles is Polvo's best album. Shapes was a departure all right, but not a good one. Some have claimed to have the balls to make a serious defense of Shapes, but they never do.

Have any balls.

At all.

Nothing in the sac, no sir.

Or defend Shapes.

Not only do I claim to have balls, and can prove it (with pictorial evidence if you really want it), but I claim to have balls to defend Shapes too!

TAL is my very close second fave of Polvo's, granted. No disagreements on how excellent that album is...

However, I like Shapes mainly because it didn't rely so much on the neat little guitar-tuning bendy tricks, odd time signatures, and Mid-eastern/Asian touches in the music as much as just try to be cohesive strong set of songs that HAD THE BALLS TO try something different for once... all the previous albums are great. Shapes, however, is a soundtrack. The variety of songs, starting with the very Wire-esque "Enemy Insects", the more ballad-y "Twenty White Tents", some recurrsing musical motifs, the lost odd stoner-rock Kung Fu movie theme that is "D.D. (S.R.)", the pleasant epilogue "Lantern", and last but not least -- in fact, Polvo's greatest song & opus ever -- "El Rocio".

Shapes is definitely not a good album for a Polvo beginner, but it's clearly remained their best album to date. It's too bad they didn't have a chance to continue in this direction.

oucheh wrote:
Ending your band with an album like Shapes? CRAP (let me hear it Faiz)

-Jeremy

for me Shapes is one of their best records. not as focused as Exploded Drawing, but full of ground-breaking ideas.

NOW, ANYONE KNOWS WHAT THAT BOWIE FUCKER IS UP TO?

damn.

gaetano wrote:NOW, ANYONE KNOWS WHAT THAT BOWIE FUCKER IS UP TO?

Last I heard was that after Polvo, he was with Helium for a while but left, and he put out a solo album under the name Libraness (which I like to listen to now and then)... then he recently produced or engineered the Black Taj album, which is Dave and Steve from Polvo's new band. So I think Black Taj is as close as you can get to Polvo, today. From what I've heard, it's more blues-rock, which seemed to be Dave's style.

oucheh wrote:Ending your band with an album like Shapes? CRAP (let me hear it Faiz)

Ending your band with a song like "Lantern," NC. But ending with Shapes, yes, C. This album sounds like the band didn't work out the songs together. Steve Popson is indeed a strong bassist, but I think he in particular is kind of MIA on this one. And though I'm a Weston fan, as much for TAL and ED as for anything else, I don't think Shapes is a good recording. The snare sound on all the songs is mediocre, as is the guitar, especially on Rock Post Rock.

I don't think the new directions work, either. Where before the non-guitar string instruments were well-integrated into the album (Exploded Drawing), on Shapes they sound tacked-on, like accessories. And though Black Taj is a great band, Polvo wasn't the place for 70s classic rock songs. The album versions of Rock Post Rock and d.d.(s.r.) are pretty thin.

NOW, ANYONE KNOWS WHAT THAT BOWIE FUCKER IS UP TO?
damn.

He (as Libraness) had a track on the WXYC Bandwidth compilation, "Sykes Temple Lane," which you can download for free here. I don't know of any music from him since. Chuck Johnson (of Spatula and Pykrete) said a couple weeks ago that Ash bought a house in the country outside Chapel Hill with land and animals. In the grand tradition of Brian McMahan, he has been working as an electrician and not adding much to an incredible discography.

NOW, ANYONE KNOWS WHAT THAT BOWIE FUCKER IS UP TO?
damn.

In the grand tradition of Brian McMahan, he has been working as an electrician and not adding much to an incredible discography.[/quote]

so, let's count:
of the last great american melodists
-one shot himself in 94 in Seattle
-another one smashed his car into a telephone pole in 97 in Dayton, Ohio
-the only living one works as an electrician

the world, she is so fucked, porca madonna.

muzorewi's daughter wrote:to be honest i've only heard exploded drawing.

That's your problem right there. Some people think it's their best, but for me it's their weakest. TAL is good, but I think their peak was with the Celebrate the New Dark Age and This Eclipse EPs. I like Shapes, particularly the glorious "El Rocio," but the EPs rule.

I'm refraining from voting, as I'm sure I've heard Unwound, but it never stuck with me.

Unwound.
Polvo is good though

i would have a hard time picking any rock band of the 90s over unwound. this case is no exception. i started my first "serious" band because i saw them play in atlanta and i no longer felt i had a choice but to try to play in a "serious" band. "seriously."

These bands are both great and I wouldn't choose one over the other so much as it depends on what I'm in the mood for.

Polvo was more influential for me. I also thought they had a greater dynamic range. Unwound made several good/great records, but it seemed that much of their work was spent toward refining the same types of records via refining the same types of songs. When "Repetition" came out, that's exactly what I felt that it was. I 'got it' at that point, and wasn't so much interested. However, within the past five or six years I've been able to listen to "Repetition" as more of a polished work and I truly enjoy it.

I bought "Cor-crane Secret" back when I still took lots of risks on records, and/or was young enough and hungry for newness enough to do so. It took some time to digest, but when "Today's Active Lifestyles" debuted, I listened to that record everyday over the course of the summer that followed. Polvo challenged me again with "Celebrate" and "Exploded Drawing", as some of the herky-jerky structure took a backseat to a more established vocal/lyrical presence and more mature songwriting. I hesitated at first but then loved most of it. Toward the end with the EP I don't remember the name of and "Shapes", which I was never interested in owning, you could hear the tearing of the bands interests and direction. Much of "Shapes" challenged me in the wrong way. Upon a few listens, it seemed too classic rock and prog, which had been coming into vogue around that time. I was certainly over noise-indulgence, as Polvo seemed to be at that point as well, but trading all the bleeps and fizzles for noodly rockstravaganzas made me feel like they were out of ideas. It was strange to hear Polvo follow the curve instead of breaking it, and becoming more sonically accessible. I'd like to listen to the record again sometime, but I think "Leaves Turn Inside" was a much more interesting and braver exit than "Shapes".

Again, Unwound was formulaic, so making an artistic shift was something that was needed and added depth to their artistic footprint in history. Polvo spent much of their career deviating from formulas, so perhaps it was natural their partnership and steam of tricky ideas would unravel. I'm just not sure I wanted to hear that on a record and would instead prefer to have been left wanting more.