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- Date Released: March 4, 2008
- Genre: Electronic
- Style: Dance
- Label: Environ / Iris
Kelley Polar dishes out more DIY symphonies.
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We Say...
“I had a vision of a stage opening, with all kinds of creatures natural and artificial coming out for the play or the opera or whatever... See, sentences like that are why I should really keep most things about what I think about my songs mysterious.” So begins a 2008 interview with Kelley Polar, in which he describes the first song on his sophomore album, I Need You to Hold on While the Sky Is Falling. Credit Polar for self-awareness, sure. But in listening to the song in question, you get the feeling that there’s almost no better explanation for what it evokes. Polar fits his voice through a vocoder, reciting a prelude of sorts, welcoming the listener into the album. An operatic diva wordlessly sings in the background, before the whole thing is taken over by a funky little disco groove complete with a full string section. An alien overture.
I Need You to Hold On..., somewhat unbelievably, begins where Polar’s stunning debut Love Songs of the Hanging Gardens left off. The follow-up sees Polar more comfortable with both his voice and orchestration. (The former is untrained, but works because the latter was schooled at both Oberlin and Julliard.) When leavened with Polar’s naïve vocals, what might otherwise come off as cold, systematized funk becomes unique DIY disco symphonies ala Bruce Haack.
“Sea of Sine Waves” might be the perfect example. It starts slowly — more wordless oohhing and aahing — before a beat kicks in, edging the tune towards its undeniable bassline. What follows is a pretty normal synth-pop song that builds and builds until everything cuts out and only a sine wave is left. Elegantly composed, idiosyncratically performed: it’s the push/pull that makes Kelley Polar worth listening to. -
They Say...
Kelley Polar's second album builds on the already rarefied majesty of his debut and expands outward in all directions: more plush neo-classical elegance, more crackling precision-disco euphoria, more dashing, gooey sentimentality, more meandering harmonic intricacy and dizzying structural invention, more pop and more fizz. I Need You to Hold on While the Sky Is Falling is an exercise in controlled excess, a lavishly calibrated and articulately decadent statement from an utterly singular artist. In compositional terms, the Juilliard-trained Kelley strikes a skillful balance between dense, dazzling chordal complexity and melodic accessibility. With some assistance from longtime consort and nu-disco guru Morgan Geist (credited with mixing and additional production), he coaxes an almost uncanny crispness and visceral presence from his limited instrumental palette of strings, synthesizers, digital beats, and vocals (sampled, spliced, and layered or simply, soulfully sung), creating a sense of sonic purity and cohesion-out-of-chaos that dovetails perfectly with his lyrical themes. This cohesiveness of conceptual content is the album's most unique and endearing quality, but also its biggest potential sticking point: I Need You to Hold On traffics in a sort of epic hodgepodge mysticism, using references to Greco-Roman mythology, new agey spiritual philosophy, and pop astrophysics to evoke a grandiose vision of universal interconnectivity. It's the kind of thing that can be nearly to impossible to stomach if presented with more than a whiff of self-seriousness, but can also feel like distasteful mockery if treated too lightly. But Kelley Polar is both smart and sensitive enough to pull it off: his delivery is straight-faced and earnest throughout, but while he clearly intends these sentiments quite sincerely, there's also a slightly ambiguous undercurrent of levity that comes through in both his nimble, nuanced musicality and occasional moments of parodic excess. Surely, the over the top, vocodered, and time-delayed guided meditation that opens "A Feeling of the All-Thing" carries a winking sense of its own ridiculousness, yet it's too bold and striking a gesture to be dismissed as mere novelty, especially given the magnificently rapturous disco fantasia that emerges out of that esoteric invocation. Metaphysical concerns aside, it's hard to argue with the exceptional beauty and powerful strangeness this music conjures up: the searing, intimate romanticism of the diaphanous "Dream in Three Parts (On Themes by Enesco)," the ruminative, infinitely self-refracting curiosity of "Zeno of Elea," the kicky kinetic energy of "Sea of Sine Waves," and, especially, the immaculate single "Entropy Reigns (In the Celestial City)," a duet ode to hedonistic indulgence with ambrosial electro-pop hooks to match. As ambitious, idiosyncratic, and satisfying as his music is in its own right, it's Kelley's virtuosity with the interplay between sounds and ideas, on a larger scale, that makes him a true visionary.
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| 01. |  |
A Feeling Of The All-Thing |
4:38 |
|
| 02. | |
Zeno Of Elea |
3:13 |
|
| 03. | |
Entropy Reigns (In The Celestial City) |
4:58 |
|
| 04. | |
Chrysanthemum |
3:54 |
|
| 05. | |
Rosenband |
4:39 |
|
| 06. | |
Satellites |
6:39 |
|
| 07. | |
A Dream In Three Parts (On Themes By Enesco) |
4:33 |
|
| 08. | |
We Live In An Expanding Universe |
4:54 |
|
| 09. | |
Sea Of Sine Waves |
5:39 |
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| 10. | |
Thurston And Grisha |
2:25 |
|
| 11. | |
In Paradisum |
2:45 |
|
11 Total Tracks, 48:17 Total Length
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