I warned you all about this incoming storm.
The new Pollyester album is flying through the atmosphere like a storm of pink and gold glitter. It gets on everything. There’s something properly addictive about this album. It’s shiny. It’s glossy. It’s catchy as hell. It’s stand-alone pieces of perfection that are joined together by The Polly Effect (that wind of wordy melodies that counter-attack strong riffs and rhythms).
The beginning of the album is a slap in the face. The first three songs are basically candidates to make a new Concierge d’Amour coup d’état. I hope people pick up on the construction of 2328626 and the proper perfection of In My Boots. It’s such a fantastic sound… Then we have Father’s eyes, which has such great You are Amen nostalgia in it…
*super cheesy scratching sound of interrupted vinyl lecture*
Ok you know what? I’ll stop comparing City of O to the first two albums, right now. It’s easy and not very clever, considering how different the eponymous album and Earthly Powers are.
Let’s do a Pollyester recap, shall we? Three albums, three ways of mixing colours together.
Pollyester by Pollyester (the yellow album, as I affectionnately call it) is all about jazz and crazy basslines and playfulness. It’s very punky, in a way. It doesn’t care what you think. How does it mixes colours? It’s a light show. Bold gestures of saturated colours bouncing together to generate lighter hues. Dark zones that grasp your attention and surexposition. The key to generating beauty is in the timing, the beautiful accidents and how a black-out (or a silence) can lead to the punchline, sometimes.
Earthly Powers is all about slapping you in the face with puns-based clever poems, while its music caresses you. The production of the album itself is way more complex, leaving room for kick-ass add-ons (djembe parties, chords, and all that jazz). How does it mixes colours? It takes coloured liquids of different densities, put them in a glass jar, shakes its content and watch as starlike speckles of liquid flirt with one another and slowly soften into clean lines.
City of O… is a different level of playfulness. It’s matured. It’s years and years of party craze and experience. It’s dance hits meet cosmic ballads, but glossier. There’s an addictive agent in this album. So, this one, how does it mixes colours? It’s watercolours, of course. Sharp experimented lines that are blended together with expertise to reveal a very well-planned realism and beauty.
Could City of O be the album of the Golden Age of Pollyester? I hope this album makes it big enough that people learn of Pollyester through it, and then go back in history and discover the other two albums. That would be awesome. It’s a beautiful Triptych.
City of O, third Pollyester LP, coming out this Friday on Disko B and Schamoni Musik.