Poli High is the newest side-project from established Denver indie-pop songwriter . The EP and project itself might come as a surprise to fans, who have been patiently awaiting another album from Widowers, Marchant’s main musical squeeze as of late.
“Poli High” also came as a surprise to Marchant himself. The EP materialized in “a few sleepless days” after Marchant received an ominous result from a PET scan indicated he might have a tumor on his spine. As a musician, if that doesn’t make you want to get off your ass and write something, nothing will.
The anxiety is palpable. Any given moment that Marchant’s bitter yowl rises above the fray on “Poli High,” it’s swallowed up soon after by shrieking organs, an endlessly modulated electric guitar and thudding drums. On “The Caves,” rhythms and chord progressions rarely stay put, trickling down from where they started to resolve in unsatisfying echoes. For “Ends In A Tie,” static abruptly washes over the startling description of surgery (Pull my dirty organs out / Sew me shut and prop me up / Tell me when I’m done”).
The underlying terror is omnipresent on “Poli High.” But instead of rendering the album in grey, Marchant seats the tension just below the surface, and lets the air in. The surprise then is that in an album so firmly locked in the mindset of disease and its ultimate resolution, there’s ecstasy. Marchant has described “Poli High” as his poppiest work to date, which is true in an obscure, bearded translation of the genre. “Hovering Low” sounds like a “Strawberry Jam”-era Animal Collective demo, complete with a stuttering vocal part possibly pulled from Avey Tare’s thin book of tricks. Crunching drums make way to the EP’s finest moment in “Moonwalker,” a defiantly hale and hearty expression in a terrifying time: “I could stare ’em in the face, turn my head and run / I’ll be better than that, I will call them by name.”
Though its inspiration is dark and real for Marchant, “Poli High” does well not to revel in what must at times be an all-consuming circumstance. Like Spiritualized’s “Songs in A&E” before it, Marchant has used grim reality as a springboard for expression. And while the two albums are world’s apart in sound, Marchant has a comparable songwriting knack, conjured most often in gut-punching lines that only sink in after the first few listens. Nothing inspires like a crisis, and for better or worse, “Poli High” is nothing if not inspired.
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Dylan Owens is Reverb’s all-purpose news blogger and album reviewer. You can read more from him in Relix magazine and the comment sections of WORLDSTARHIPHOP.
