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
'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
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
's tunes have sharpened into fully defined grunge pop gems. By contrast, the material on
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,
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
' 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
, a collection that serves much more as a scrapbook-style artifact of
' weird, awkward home-recording roots than as a stand-alone album. ~ Fred Thomas