The Polyphonic Spree Albums (3)
What The Critics Say
Listening to the Polyphonic Spree's studio recordings over the years has been a revelatory and sometimes frustrating experience. The reason is quite simple: excess. Not that excess in and of itself is a bad thing. In many cases it's the excess of joy and celebratory mass euphoria that Tim DeLaughter and crew put into their recordings that can be overwhelming at times and push the listener into spaces she or he might not otherwise even consider -- but to be taken there all the time is at times a bit much. Every band should have "problems" like these. That said, they are never irritating, not even slightly ridiculous. As a band they have put it out there on every record, holding nothing back. This is even true of the Fragile Army, a recording that offers new directions in this band and which combines Phil Spector-ish orgiastic excess, spiritual temerity, and the willful self-consciousness that allows emotion full reign in a blend of music that underscores emotion even while being outrageously sophisticated in structure, using the choir, woodwinds, and of course guitars, basses, drums, and keyboard. Theirs is the most aggressively tender music in pop. Forget the indie rock thing; this band has nothing to do with that whole ghetto. This performance of the Polyphonic Spree at Austin City Limits is a kind of test. Recorded in 2004, PS performs much of the Together We're Heavy album with a few oldies but goodies tossed in, but it all flows. The title track that closes that album isn't here; they perform "Section 2: It's the Sun," and the band kicks the show off with harpist Ricky Rasura's "Bizarre Prayer." What comes across over this 51-minute performance is that the excess that comes out of the recording studio to the listener is all here, but because of the "smoothing" process that happens during the mixing, that excess is absent here. Many of the Live from Austin, TX discs sound flat and lifeless, the energetic quality of a performance aired on television is utterly absent on digitally imprinted plastic. In this case? It crackles, bristles, wails and soars. It feels so organic and intrinsically real that it offers an accurate picture of this outrageously large band (24 pieces here) in front of an audience. There are a few ragged edges in "Section 2: It's the Sun," where the choir sort of overwhelms itself, but the horns, harp, and dynamics of this piece -- even with the intonation slightly off -- has so much heart it can not only be forgiven but celebrated for how well such a thing comes off. It's the biggest sounding song they've ever done, and it feels like it should be a finale, but it happens in track three! There are also moments of great intimacy here, as in "Section 16: One Man Show," with the harp and flutes hovering around DeLaughter as he delivers one of his most heartfelt lyrics. When you get to the finale, "Section 19: When the Fool Becomes a King," the great promise of David Bowie's Hunky Dory, through the outrageous decadent excesses of his Diamond Dogs periods is brought into the clear light of a new morning in a looking glass: Live is rooted in the same glammed-out psychedelia and prog rock, yet it's anything but decadent. "Love the life you choose/keep yourself feeling brand new/Love your strife with life/Everyone wants to know why/And Love your strife for you/Keep yourself feeling brand new/And love your strife with God/Yes everyone wants to know love...." It sounds like the ending to Godspell, but it's so much tougher, it rocks so much harder, and is so utterly poignant: these guys mean it. The end if album brings, as predicted, exhaustion on the listener's part, yes, but some kind of nervous exhilaration, too. How can anyone say anything like this during wartime? Never did it need to be said more. And PS -- that wild neo-hippie crew from Texas -- do just that. "Hail to the sky..." indeed. The only thing that could improve this performance is seeing it. And you can see it as there is a brilliantly shot DVD/CD edition available, as well. Thank your gods for Polyphonic Spree. This is precisely the kind of excess needed in uncertain times: excessive optimism that is not naïve. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
On its third proper full-length and first for new label TVT, Texas supergroup -- in numbers, that is -- Polyphonic Spree, the only rock & roll band to boast a full size choir as part of its recording and touring incarnations, ditch the robes in favor of black military style outfits with red crosses stitched properly into place and displayed prominently. Director Mike Mills named the album. The PS's frontman and chief composer Tim DeLaughter scored his debut feature film Thumbsucker for the indie big screen (after the death of its original composer Elliott Smith). Musically, The Fragile Army is both a return to tried and true methods and simultaneously, a departure. The enormous sound of the PS, with its tightly structured compositions by DeLaughter and Julie Doyle hasn't changed that much. One can hear elements of every big rock production band from the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev to David Bowie in its sonic mix. And PS's trademark sunshine-drenched pop symphonica hasn't disappeared, or even taken a hiatus. It's here. What's new is a more textured melancholy in the darker, or at least sadder-themed songs that appeared first on the group's Wait EP earlier in 2007. There is equal weight given to both. A fine example is on the title track (also known as "Section 24" in the band's numerically ordered catalog). Beginning with a mournful solo piano and DeLaughter's opening words: "Oh how we miss/They're so far gone/Will they move when the valley explodes/We'll make no mistakes, if they move too late/Well we wish that they would have called you home/Hold the line/Please be right/You left them on the floor/Hold the line call off the strike/We left them on the floor/Oh no, oh no...." It would be an elegy, except that then the brass section kicks in halfway through the verse, the choir enters in response, and we can hear Bowie on Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs, finding a requiem for that which has passed and the regret involved in not taking the opportunity to reach out when everything was still possible. Typewriter sounds, synths, fat horns, and the swirling choir explode into the middle of this mournful pop gem: "It's time for you to lose your excitement..." In exactly four minutes the song moves from slow ballad to blown-out glam vaudeville suite. It opens onto "We Crawl," with an Herb Alpert-styled opening horn line, painted by piano, guitars, and popping snare drums as DeLaughter sings: "Well everybody tries, to keep themselves alive/You were younger yesterday/And feelin' not so gray..." the piano answers, chords wind around the melody, and DeLaughter answers it: "Well everybody cries/I think I'm beginning to find/I was younger yesterday/And I'm feelin' not so gray/We're layin down in bed/The days go by in my head/Yeah, I'll fake it if I can't sleep/And together we can get some relief..." before the choir and the band slide right in stride "And now you know you're beautiful/You've always wondered/Now you know/Everything's alright...Together We're alright." As the piano finds itself in the heart of the melody, the tune changes and becomes truly plural. But the place, it seems, "we're alright," is in our brokenness, doubt, and feelings of inadequacy, and flaws. Together we make a whole. As the tune becomes a majestically wrought pomp and circumstance march by a rag-tag, shoeless group of survivors, it's obvious this is the only kind of optimism possible because it's not rooted in post-hippie idealism, but in everyday life and its all-but-impossible sense of failure. The Fragile Army succeeds in large part because of the groundedness of its subject matter. Its production is truly elegant thanks to John Congleton and mixing engineer Jay Ruston. The melodies are far more varied than on previous outings, and the sense of dynamics and balance of tension in these songs -- and the arrangements that accompany them -- are the most sophisticated this group has ever pulled off. On The Fragile Army PS seem more like a group and not simply personnel share cropping of its members for the ideas of DeLaughter. There's a kind of democratically shared weight in these tunes: check the instrumental interplay against the singers in "Mental Cabaret" (which was the leadoff track from the Wait EP). Bowie is thanked in the credits for his support. While there's no doubt he provided it in speaking about them publicly, he also provided an inspiration that goes far beyond. Here is the grand pop image watching the past watch itself in the mirror of the future. Bowie is the Magi who called it to life -- in a sense -- toward the middle of the '70s, exploding his own myth just to create a new one. Uniforms notwithstanding, PS is a pop group that embodies a new American mythology where drama, emotion, brokenness and a penchant for idealism in spite of it all are played out in fantastically simple poetry and glorious splashes of primary colors -- in this case the choice of red, white, blue and black is unmistakable. The Spree are no longer soaked in smiley-face naïveté, they communally address, in their own musical language -- which embodies everything from psychedelic rock, easy listening, glam, Gilbert & Sullivan chorale, and even shapeshifting electronic chilliness (check "Light to Follow") -- to illustrate what cannot be spoken or addressed by bombast. Some of the band's earlier fans may be put off by the polish that's here, while many who haven't heard PS before may be drawn to its infectious pop musicology wherein love, laughter, death, grief and dislocation are all broached and given shares inside a wildly accessible record album. For some The Fragile Army will feel like a complete rejection of indie rock and its post-intellectual notions of cred and sellout. That's good; it means that the Spree are on the right track to being down here on the ground with the rest of us instead of watching with studied detachment from under a pair of shades in a bed sit somewhere. One can only hope that a recording this finely and carefully crafted, and designed to be heard, will in fact be so, by more than the "in the know" few. The Fragile Army is about the many places we are alike collectively, but find ourselves alone, and in that realization we may come together to form a new community. It's a noble intention offered in a very simple and direct way, with lots of beautiful noise to carry the message. If this is indeed where pop can travel in an age of replication and cultural dis-ease, then let there be more. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
'Together We're Heavy'
Release Date 6/29/2004
Tracks 10
Label Hollywood
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
On the cover of Together We're Heavy, the Polyphonic Spree appear robes in every color of the rainbow instead of the snowy white garb that they used to wear, but that might be the biggest difference between this album and the band's debut, The Beginning Stages Of.... The newer album's track listing even picks up where The Beginning Stages Of... left off, beginning with "Section 11 (A Long Day Continues/We Sound Amazed)," and for the most part, Together We're Heavy's sonics are also a continuation. The band's sound and feel -- which recalls the sweeping symphonics of See You on the Other Side-era Mercury Rev (minus the bipolar tendencies) and the wide-eyed optimism of the Flaming Lips (but without Wayne Coyne's Willy Wonka-like mischievousness) -- remains intact as do platitude-like lyrics such as "It's the feel-good time of the day" and "keep yourself feeling brand-new." However, the changes that have been made on Together We're Heavy are small but significant. Thanks to co-producers Eric Drew Feldman and the Speekers, the album sounds more polished and elaborate than The Beginning Stages Of..., but not bigger, since the band's sound was already pretty massive. The songs' melodies are more complex, and often more restrained than they were before, particularly on the slow-building opening track and "Section 18 (Everything Starts at the Sea)," both of which are more about bathing the listener in warm, expansive sounds than verse-chorus-verse structure. Even the album's poppiest songs, like the bouncy "Section 12 (Hold Me Now)" and "Section 14 (Two Thousand Places)," don't sound quite as much like one long chorus as "Follow the Day" and "Soldier Girl" did, although nothing on this album is as immediate as either of those songs. Occasionally, as on "Section 19 (When the Fool Becomes a King)," the Polyphonic Spree still seems to want to bully its listeners into euphoria through sheer volume, but on Together We're Heavy, Tim DeLaughter and crew seem more aware that life, even in the smiley-face world they've created, isn't always rainbows and sunshine. "Section 16 (One Man's Show)" is one of their saddest songs, as well as one of their prettiest; even though it gradually gets bigger and louder, it's never bombastic. Likewise, the winsome ballads "Section 13 (Diamonds/Mild Devotion to Majesty)" and "Section 17 (Suitcase Calling)" acknowledge that life can be difficult, but remain cautiously optimistic. However, as distinctive as the band's sound is, it's not particularly varied, and two-thirds of the way through the album things may start to drag a little for those who aren't deeply indoctrinated in the ways of the Polyphonic Spree. But, for those whom the band's manifesto of boundless love, hope, and playfulness really strikes a chord, Together We're Heavy offers more uplifting, colorful psychedelic whimsy. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide
