The Polyphonic Spree 'Together We're Heavy'
Gone are the white robes and space-prog. In come Armani suits, River Island loafers and MOR-rock, whilst Tim DeLaughter has gone back to his original name of Tim Smith. They’re religious, but they shy away from it. “Music,” they say, “has no place for that.”: The Polyphonic Spree wouldn’t be quite so, err, polyphonic if they weren’t the robe-quilted Cult Of Bonkers that we see before us. Fortunately, the only change that’s really taken place is the white robes have been replaced with coloured ones. Everything else is still totally insane.
‘Together We’re Heavy’ rises from the ashes of its troubled beginnings (record companies not willing to fork out money on them) a total and utter triumph. From start to end, it wavers on disappearing up it’s own arse but walks the line brilliantly. And, hey, if you can’t deal with a little pretension, then you probably shouldn’t be into music. After all, if you can accept the fact that there are no songs here (instead, they’ve been replaced by ‘sections’), then you can accept the fact that The Polyphonic Spree are as good as Mercury Rev were when they released ‘Deserter’s Songs’ and The Flaming Lips were when they released ‘The Soft Bulletin’ i.e, bang on the money.
The pastoral-pop of ‘A Long Day Continues/We Sound Amazed’ (to save confusion, we’ll ditch the ‘Sections’ for now, eh?) opens the clouds, resembling a reflective, more epic ‘Soldier Girl’ at first and veers into darker balladry before soaring off into the sky. ‘Hold Me Now’ is total euphoria and sounds like every great Beatles song melted down and squeezed into four minutes. ‘Two Thousand Places’ sounds, oddly, like the big mountain-top ending to Guns’n’Roses ‘November Rain’ and ‘One Man Show’ is melancholy folk.
Every song here is as big and significant as the Hollywood sign. More importantly, the music completely erodes any lingering thoughts in your brain that The Polyphonic Spree are a novelty band. Sure, they’re never gonna be the sort of band you’re gonna see hanging out down your local, but they’re magical and ‘Together We’re Heavy’ just makes everything else, real life included, just seem shit really.
The Polyphonic Spree 'Together We're Heavy' (Good Records)
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