Dizzy Polizzy [LP]

As the main mind behind Philadelphia melodic scuzz rockers Purling Hiss, Mike Polizze wove together overpowering walls of guitar rock with lackadaisical slacker pop melodies, resulting in infectiously heavy albums like 2013's excellent Water on Mars. While the pop core at the center of Polizze's solo songs was still gestating in the early to mid-2000s, he was playing in indie psych collective Birds of Maya and squeezing out songs onto a deteriorating four-track in the meantime. Still a few years away from becoming Purling Hiss, Polizze's crumbling solo tunes made it onto small-run releases sold on tour, Dizzy Polizzy first existing as a CD-R in 2006 and then seeing re-release as an expanded cassette in 2011 once Purling Hiss had broken through to a wider audience. The 2014 release on Drag City came not just in the largest edition, far exceeding the 50- and 100-copy runs of its tour-only releases, but also follows several albums where Polizze's tunes have sharpened into fully defined grunge pop gems. By contrast, the material on Dizzy Polizzy is raw, lo-fi, and messy, but will serve as interesting counterpoint to any invested fan. Typically candid in nature, the 11 tracks here seem to have never fully considered they'd ever have any type of audience. Brittle, hissy, and astonishingly buried recording quality aside, Polizze bounds from one interesting experiment to the next, be it the spastic synth funk freak-out of "Millions of Colors" or the Neil Young-flavored downer demo "Digh High." The germ of Purling Hiss' brilliance is present here, coming through on the strained melody of "The Earth Creature" and the phaser-soaked acoustics of "Preface." To go along with the stronger songwriting moments there are equal helpings of jarring distortion and bewilderingly poor mixing choices, but the lo-fi confusion becomes part of the fun on Dizzy Polizzy, a collection that serves much more as a scrapbook-style artifact of Purling Hiss' weird, awkward home-recording roots than as a stand-alone album. ~ Fred Thomas