Chapel Hill Part One: Celebrate the New Dark Age with Polvo

You might have noticed that some of the older folk in the underground independent music (hitherto referred to as Undie) scene salivating at the prospect of shows by a band called Polvo. Indeed, the final line-up of the band that recorded the fine swan-song Shapes in 1997 is playing the All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival in England next year. The casual or younger Undie enthusiast may well be wondering what all the fuss is about and with good reason. After all, such are the times that these days it is more news-worthy when a band decides not to reform. I amongst others welcome the return of Polvo, if only because it reminds me of the salad days of my appreciation what we used to call Indie Rock. In order to fully understand the appeal of a band such as Polvo, we must revisit that forgotten era known as the nineties and specifically a small town in North Carolina called Chapel Hill.

If you’ve been to your local Indie emporium or drinking hole in the last week or so, you might have noticed a mild hubbub amongst the older denizens. They of fading Pavement t-shirts and clove cigarettes, supping pints of real ale and contemplating the dance floor sadly. If you’re feeling brave you might catch one of them by the recently patched elbow of their tweed jacket and ask them to spin thee a yarn of that dim and distant year of nineteen hundred and ninety one. “What know thee of the Indie Rock”, he may ask at once. Exercise caution at this point, pale traveller. No doubt you are well versed in the Indie Rock as we live and breathe in twenty ought seven but this is hardly enough to impress a wizened veteran such as this old coot. Hard as it may be to imagine now but there was a time when Indie Rock was not the sole premise of incestuous Canadian super-groups comprised of three to four songwriters and a veritable orchestra of backing musicians. There was a time when Indie Rock was quartets of rail thin young men in thick glasses, sometimes with as few as one songwriter per band. A Pitchfork was one such band and not the trend-setting behemoth we know and tolerate today. Or it was an actual Pitchfork, which is a device used to dig through thick hay.

Once upon a time, the elder Indie Rocker will begin once you have procured him a half pint of Tar Barrel Stout, there was band from California called Black Flag. This band was wrought of British punk and West Coast Hardcore. Black Flag were famous for playing everywhere all the time. If you lived in America and walked out onto any street corner during the early 80s, you might well see Black Flag arriving in your town. Stand there for a moment longer and you might end up with a gig flyer stuck over your face. If you still hadn’t learned your lesson and dallied even longer, you might end up playing in the band for a couple of years. Although Black Flag were more like a group of pirates than a rock band, they contributed enormously to the underground music scene of North America. They near single-handedly trail-blazed a network of underground venues through merciless touring schedules and pioneered the independent record label through their grass roots enterprise SST. In the mid-eighties, SST was the home to all manner of weird and wonderful rock bands, including fabled avant garde Manhattanites Sonic Youth. This group was quite atypical of their label-mates in that their music was tinted with strange alternate tunings and beatnik sensibilities. At their creative peak the quartet produced the double punch of Evol and Sister, two records which successfully merged the dissonance of Glenn Branca, the raw power of the Stooges and the southern-fried Americana of the Creedence Clearwater Revival. In some ways, these two groups personified Indie Rock during the 80s.

When Black Flag played Seattle, Washington in 1986, many of the people in the audience were inspired to form their own bands. Unfortunately, for all their hard work in the field of underground music, Black Flag’s music was largely atrocious. Lowest common denominator nihilism with intolerable machismo thrown in for good measure. When Seattle hosted Black Flag they were in their last year as a band, caught between the influences of bad hair metal and Dio-era Black Sabbath. The Seattle groups that followed the Flag seemed to incorporate the worst aspects of this sound. Tapped by wily entrepreneurs Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt’s Sub Pop label, these bands came to be known as Grunge. Meanwhile, on the East Coast in North Carolina, the small university town of Chapel Hill was undergoing a similar musical revolution. The right combination of supportive venues and fledgling micro-labels created the perfect atmosphere for good bands. In 1989, the punk band Chunk added the prefix Super to their name and released a self-titled debut album on Matador Records. Superchunk was lead by singer/songwriter Mac MacCaughan and his partner Laura Ballance, who became synonymous with Chapel Hill’s vibrant music scene upon forming the steadfastly independent Merge Records. MacCaughan also played drums with Seam, the band formed from the ashes of acclaimed post-hardcore group Bitch Magnet. As the scene grew, gradually Chapel Hill began to attract nationwide attention.

Similarly, the Seattle grunge scene imploded on the virgin shores of 1990. Soon major record labels came calling around the North-western state of Washington. Sub Pop’s roster was plucked dry in the rush to capitalise on the self-fulfilling ‘Grunge Phenomena’. As the decade progressed, both scenes fought to overcome their immediate difficulties. In Seattle, the fight was with the rampant heroin addiction that dogged local musicians. In Chapel Hill, it was with advanced trigonometry assignments that had to be completed before band practice. Eventually the intense corporate speculation paid of with dividends as the major labels scored big with Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. By contrast, most Chapel Hill bands simply weren’t interested in scoring a major label deal. In an interview with Magnet, Mac MacCaughan commented on the phenomena - “At some point in the mid-90s there was definitely a sense of, ‘Oh, this kind of music could be genuinely popular!’ People would start bands thinking, ‘I can make a living doing this‘. But no one in the right mind starts a band thinking that.”

Typically of bands from Chapel Hill, Polvo began in the classroom. Ash Bowie and Dave Brylawski had met while taking a Spanish language course at the University of North Carolina. From these discussions they also found a name for their new project by way of the Spanish word for dust - Polvo. Bowie and Brylawski had also been classmates with Mac MacCaughan in high school, a connection which helped them strike up a relationship with Merge Records. The duo shared guitar duty and recruited fellow students Steve Popson and Eddie Watkins on bass and drums respectively. In 1991, the group recorded their debut album Cor-Crane Secret. The album showcased a sound that was more than a little indebted to Sonic Youth’s guitar meanderings but also displayed Bowie and Brylawski’s fondness for eastern tinged rhythmic devices. While the debut was somewhat undeveloped, it still garnered critical acclaim amongst fans of Merge Records and live shows established a supportive fan base in their hometown.

The following year’s Today’s Active Lifestyles was a more consistent and ambitious effort, to this day often cited as the band’s creative high-water mark. The thundering clamour of ‘Thermal Treasure’ demonstrates the band’s unnerving talent for stopping on the dime and abruptly changing the tone mid-song. Conversely, the following ‘Lazy Comet’ bears little resemblance to the preceding number, starting with an ominous knell of a gong and becoming even weirder from there onwards. As the rest of the band settles into building a steady and laconic drone, Brylawski’s guitar-playing sounds like he has electrified a critically out of tune rabab. Ash Bowie sermonises above the instrumental hubbub until the band suddenly breaks into an extended jam that would have Sonic Youth nodding their heads in approval. With a hop, a skip and a jump - the band is back into the song with scarcely three minutes on the clock. After a brief instrumental curiouso, ‘Sure Shot’ provides one of the album’s most memorable songs. The guitars chatter like field bells and a deceptively bright harmony carries the song to the two minute mark until once again the band seem to change their mind about the song and decide it needs a sparse and discordant fadeout. The fret-board experimentation continues on ‘Stinger’, which presents a sound that might be more than a little familiar to fans of Les Savy Fav. The one-two punch of the simmering ‘Time isn’t on my Side’ followed by the clattering assault of ‘Action Vs. Vibe’ rounds the album out before the meandering ’Gemini Cusp’ brings proceedings to a conclusion.

The following years brought two excellent EPs which presented a brighter sound and broader range of influences. Celebrate the New Dark Age from 1994 might well be Polvo’s finest record, shorn of the aimless noodling that would often infect their LPs. While the preceding records were murky affairs, the songs glimmer like newly polished chrome. “We’ve just bought a sitar, so be prepared” warns Bowie on the ragged ‘Old Lystra’. A year later a second EP This Eclipse was recorded with Slint producer Brian Paulson, providing music conspirators with a telling link to that group’s Spiderland opus from 1991. On the opening ‘Bat Radar’ Polvo seem to have perfected their wonderfully broken sound, as guitar lines weave in and out of Watkins’ solid backbeat. ‘Titan Up’ moves from an artfully tempered 56k modem sound to the greatest song Sonic Youth never wrote. Sadly the following years ambitious and overblown Exploded Drawing is a step back to the dense fog of the first record and the songs suffer as a result. The band seem lost and unsure of themselves throughout and the inclusion of sixteen tracks, which could easily have been shorn to half of that number in all truth, doesn’t help. Eventually, repeat listenings reveal new and intriguing formula of guitar, bass and drum but it’s still the weakest record of the latter stages of the group’s career. As Ash Bowie became increasingly distracted by his other band Helium, the quartet managed to regroup for the truly excellent Shapes in 1997. As previously, Polvo were skilfully recorded by Bob Weston but this time around clearly didn’t feel the need to bury their songs behind an artfully dour mix. A few of the songs on Shapes are borderline commercial, albeit with the trademark squibs and squeaks intact. Tensions obviously arose as Eddie Watkins left half way through the recording sessions and the band foundered on the supporting tour mere months later. When Polvo play in the UK next year, it will be the first time they have played together in more than a decade. Plenty of time to familiarise yourself with their varied and rewarding back catalogue until then.

- Tommy Dski