Mike Polizze - Around Sound

The second solo record by Mike Polizze of Philadelphia psych-squallers Purling Hiss and Birds of Maya, a rainier and more pensive affair than its predecessor—despite its playful humor and plentiful hooks affirms his status as a consummate (and now not-so-secret) craftsman of instantly memorable bucolic odes of languid beauty, deepening his fingerstyle acoustic guitar magic and finally manifesting the title of the classic Hiss anthem “Run from the City.” Despite its playful humor and plentiful hooks, Around Sound is a rainier and more pensive affair than its pandemic-era predecessor, Long Lost Solace Find (2020). It affirms Polizze’s status as a consummate (and now not-so-secret) craftsman of instantly memorable bucolic odes of languid beauty, deepening his fingerstyle acoustic guitar magic and finally manifesting the title of the classic 2010 Hiss anthem “Run from the City.” If Long Lost Solace Find revealed the sunshine and sweetness sometimes veiled by the combustible guitar leads and sheer volume of Purling Hiss (especially in their live incarnation), then Around Sound complicates that picture, infilling a dusky chiaroscuro, ambiguous shadows that play across the late afternoon light.

Once again Polizze recorded gradually, in close collaboration with co-producer and engineer Jeff Zeigler, over the course of the intervening years since Long Lost Solace Find (and the droll demos and outtakes tape, Dizzy Demos: 2 Tickets to Cheeseburger in Paradise, that followed in its wake). Mike plays everything on the record—in addition to guitar and vocals, bass, drums, piano, and even mellotron and vibraphone—and it is a testament to Zeigler’s mixing that the arrangements of songs like “Wake Up” and “Too Much Thinking” avoid any sense of insularity, instead blooming like a band in a room. But the sparer songs foregrounding his guitar and vocals, like album opener “After the Deluge” (which begins abruptly in media res, mid-picking) and the aforementioned “Is There Anybody Out There?” and “Fast Blues,” demonstrate the essentially solitary nature of these songs and Polizze’s self-effacing facility in articulating their enigmas.