Kelley Polar's 2005 debut Love Songs of The Hanging Gardens proved that crafted, deeply personal music was still possible in the plastic, disposable world that is 21st century pop. Polar's new album, I Need You to Hold On While the Sky Is Falling, crystallizes that possibility into a unique, strange and beautiful collection of songs that somehow, by accident or design, remains utterly accessible. In other words: outsider pop.
Review:
Kelley Polar's second album builds on the already rarefied majesty of
his debut and expands outward in all directions: more plush neo-classical
elegance, more crackling precision-disco euphoria, more dashing, gooey
sentimentality, more meandering harmonic intricacy and dizzying structural
invention, more pop and more fizz. I Need You to Hold on While the Sky Is
Falling is an exercise in controlled excess, a lavishly calibrated and
articulately decadent statement from an utterly singular artist. In
compositional terms, the Juilliard-trained Kelley strikes a skillful balance
between dense, dazzling chordal complexity and melodic accessibility. With some
assistance from longtime consort and nu-disco guru Morgan Geist (credited with
mixing and additional production), he coaxes an almost uncanny crispness and
visceral presence from his limited instrumental palette of strings,
synthesizers, digital beats, and vocals (sampled, spliced, and layered or
simply, soulfully sung), creating a sense of sonic purity and
cohesion-out-of-chaos that dovetails perfectly with his lyrical themes. This
cohesiveness of conceptual content is the album's most unique and endearing
quality, but also its biggest potential sticking point: I Need You to Hold On
traffics in a sort of epic hodgepodge mysticism, using references to Greco-Roman
mythology, new agey spiritual philosophy, and pop astrophysics to evoke a
grandiose vision of universal interconnectivity. It's the kind of thing that
can be nearly to impossible to stomach if presented with more than a whiff of
self-seriousness, but can also feel like distasteful mockery if treated too
lightly. But Kelley Polar is both smart and sensitive enough to pull it off: his
delivery is straight-faced and earnest throughout, but while he clearly intends
these sentiments quite sincerely, there's also a slightly ambiguous
undercurrent of levity that comes through in both his nimble, nuanced musicality
and occasional moments of parodic excess. Surely, the over the top, vocodered,
and time-delayed guided meditation that opens “A Feeling of the All-Thing”
carries a winking sense of its own ridiculousness, yet it's too bold and
striking a gesture to be dismissed as mere novelty, especially given the
magnificently rapturous disco fantasia that emerges out of that esoteric
invocation. Metaphysical concerns aside, it's hard to argue with the
exceptional beauty and powerful strangeness this music conjures up: the searing,
intimate romanticism of the diaphanous “Dream in Three Parts (On Themes by
Enesco),” the ruminative, infinitely self-refracting curiosity of “Zeno of
Elea,” the kicky kinetic energy of “Sea of Sine Waves,” and, especially,
the immaculate single “Entropy Reigns (In the Celestial City),” a duet ode
to hedonistic indulgence with ambrosial electro-pop hooks to match. As
ambitious, idiosyncratic, and satisfying as his music is in its own right,
it's Kelley's virtuosity with the interplay between sounds and ideas, on a
larger scale, that makes him a true visionary.
All Music Guide – K. Ross Hoffman