Review Summary: Jagged edges: check. Tangible contours: hmm...
While hardly the most successful of the ‘90s’ just-about-melodic noise rock bands, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better example of that label’s various connotations than Polvo. You’ll know what I mean if you’re in the least partial to loud, noisey, dissonant, or (above all) innovative things involving guitars, amplifiers, feedback and distortion. Polvo made an art out of how far they took these Great Ingredients into stranger, more abrasive territory than many of their contemporaries (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Built to Spill, Pavement, yada yada), all while conserving the saccharine mopeyness that made this sound so infectious to begin with. As such, their debut
Cor-Crane Secret is a delirious mess of an album that evidences Polvo’s strengths and drawbacks in almost equal measure. Starting on a high note and encapsulating the former, “Vibracobra” is a gorgeous piece that picks up a steady momentum and slouches cohesively from hook to hook. The first two minutes alone are a gorgeous melodic love letter to everything engaging about quote-unquote guitar music, and the track as a whole is a must for just about any alt/noise/indie fan. So far, so good.
The flip side, as quickly becomes apparent, is that the majority of the album plays out as a cluttered mess, overloaded with ideas that aren’t given the space they need to land. Now, these ideas are individually strong for the most part, but Polvo could have thrown the strongest content in the world into delivery as disorganised as this and it would still have felt like a slight botch. But hold the phone there! Disorganisation and mess are part of the charm on albums like this, no? What would
Daydream Nation have been without those meandering instrumentals? Would
Slanted & Enchanted have been half as alluring if every other song didn’t sound like the lowest common denominator of a weekday hangover? Unfortunately,
Cor-Crane Secret misses out one these albums’ niche of gratifying [semblance of] sloppiness because its untidy facets are so extensive that they obstruct its clamorous goodness from resonating as such. “Bend or Break” suffers particularly in this regard, playing out as a mix of individually delicious permutations of noisey riffage that are sandwiched together so haphazardly that the song as a whole comes across as shapeless and immemorable. The same is true for many tracks here, but “Bend or Break” is the longest, most obvious mishmash. A partial reason for this jumble is the album’s fairly homogenous dynamic wavelength; its dynamics are switched up for momentary shock value, but the resulting sections are never explored enough to deliver noteworthy structural shifts before things revert to Gear: Loud (something dodged by “Vibracobra”’s deft ebb and flow and “Well Is Deep”’s initial tease of a measured opening before everything goes hell to leather at around 1:40). The upshot of this is that for an album so full of jagged edges,
Cor-Crane Secret is disarmingly short on tangible contours.
Somewhat frustratingly, Polvo prove that they
can anchor their overdrive heroics in decent songwriting when they put their hand to it: “Can I Ride”, “Sense of It”, "Channel Changer" and the aforementioned “Vibracobra” are particular standouts in this regard and they group would showcase a far more focused approach to writing while preserving all this album’s best qualities on the exemplary
Today's Active Lifestyles just a year later. They’re a talented bunch with an aesthetic any fan of the noisier side of the ‘90s will adore, and
Cor-Crane Secret certainly reaps a good deal of benefit for this. It’s a fun, worthwhile listen for those so inclined, but at the end of the day its tone and execution are such that it can only be used for preaching to the choir.
