[ATTENDED: August 26, 2017] Purling Hiss
I know Purling Hiss from NPR’s All Songs Considered. Last year they played the band’s “3000 AD” which I instantly fell in love with. There was a cool shoegaze feel to it with a bunch of noisy elements that I really enjoyed.
I knew that the bulk of the band’s catalog was basically Mike Polizze making music for himself. It was pretty noisy and abstract with lots of jam moments. They are now a band–I’m not sure who the other two guys in the band were (based on the latest album, I’m assuming Ben Hart on drums and Dan Provenzano on bass)–and they have gotten more musical since then. But thy are still noisy. So I expected a lot of squalling feedback and pummeling sounds.
I was quite pleased with how melodic the band’s songs were (no idea what songs they played, but I assume most of it came from their newest album).
The only problem is that the bass was turned up really loud. I don’t know if it’s because I was right by his monitor or if they were playing out of their amps and I was in front of the bass, but for the first two songs I could barely hear Polizze at all–and certainly not while he was soloing away. It was really disappointing. After two songs I backed up from the stage a bit and could hear his guitar and vocal in one of the side speakers. But really I had to try to not listen to the bass when I wanted to hear his guitar solos. So that kind of sucked. Especially since Polizze was wailing away like nobody’s business.
He reminded me in style of the way Neil Young would lurch around, hunched over, just totally immersed in his guitar (he even has Neil’s hair and shirt). But his sound was very different–a lot of squeals and squalls and feedback and tons of whammy bar abuse.
They played for about 45 minutes and the crowd was really quite into it. Polizze didn’t speak a lot, but he wailed on his guitar.
They didn’t exactly fit in with the punkier nature of the show overall, but they were local and the crowd responded appropriately.
I know they played “Learning Slowly” and that the final song, “Everybody in the USA” featured a really long guitar solo–he wailed and soloed, he feedbacked against the amps, he stomped around and was generally rocking. And when the song ended, the drummer threw his sticks in his air, the bassist dropped his bass and everybody walked off. It was pretty dramatic.
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