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Their name is about as analog as it gets. Hiss, meaning the kind of white noise that is heard in the wild and sizzles out of tape recordings, like the four-track Yamaha Purling Hiss lead guitarist and singer Mike Polizze has used to make demos since he was 18. Purling, as in the stitching technique used in knitting, but also referring to the rippling effect of a stream. As Polizze once described the origins of Purling Hiss to fellow Philadelphia musician Matt Korvette of the hardcore band Pissed Jeans: “I tried to push the mixes harder, to get a scorched sound.” But since 2008, when Purling Hiss was essentially a one-man guitar band born in a bedroom in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood, that scorched sound and cosmic shredding has expanded exponentially, into the now-three-piece band’s latest album, High Bias, out next month on Drag City: a record that channels a deep, heavy affection for classic punk rock but feels primed for the stadium too.
The brand-new single, “3000 AD,” premiering here today hooks in an instantly stirring and resonant way that has as much to do with nostalgia as it does the future its title evokes. The opening, chorus-y riff could be plucked from the ’80s, maybe an early Killing Joke song, but it’s actually a rediscovered part from Polizze’s own vaults, a melody he stumbled on again fifteen years after the fact. “I didn’t use it at the time, but I never forgot it. I kind of exhumed it in a way and brought it back,” he said on the phone last week from the Hopscotch festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he’d just played a set with the band Watery Love. “It’s about something that’s far away like the future is far away. Maybe it’s also a feeling that’s always been with you, or next to you, but you can’t quite hold on to it. It isn’t tangible. In a way, that’s part of what liking psychedelic music is about. It can be kind of a blurry thing... We focused a lot this time on the clarity of the recordings and the structure of the song, but then there’s this question: How do you implement a psychedelic idea?”
Listen to “3000 AD” by Purling Hiss from the forthcoming album High Bias
It’s a question Polizze’s been asking himself for years, in large and small ways, alternately solitary and sprawlingly extroverted, on previous albums on Woodsist and Permanent Records and Mexican Summer, and more recently, on the albums Water on Mars, Dizzy Polizzy, and Weirdon. On High Bias, along with band members Ben Leaphart, and Dan Provenzano, he set out to capture what Purling Hiss has become onstage, a full-throttle energy and largeness that threatens to outgrow the hazy, wiry connotations of their name. Since the early 2000s, Polizze has been solidly embedded in the same guitar-heavy Philadelphia scene that brought forth his good friend Kurt Vile (who first prodded him to start Purling Hiss as a side project), as well as The War on Drugs, the aforementioned Pissed Jeans, and Polizze’s longtime band Birds of Maya, a band he joined in the old-school way, spotting a flier with pull-off in a record store that name-checked the Stooges, Blue Cheer, and Acid Mothers Temple.
“I was a normal suburbs kid in a way,” said Polizze, who grew up 30 minutes outside Philadelphia in Media, Pennsylvania; he moved to the city in his early 20s. “I didn’t have older siblings—I have one younger sister—so I didn’t have mentors in the way of ‘hey, come to the squat and see this show.’” By the time he was a teenager, he’d found his way to Jimi Hendrix records, and ditched the piano for guitar and became “a real nerd” about it. “Then I started going to punk shows and I decided classic rock couldn’t possibly be cool.” Elsewhere on High Bias there are nods to PiL, for instance, on the song “Pulsations,” to Bad Brains (on “Notion Sickness,” Polizze said, “I tried to do my best Dr. Know”); the lyrics of the jangling, stripped down “Follow You Around” could easily join the extensive catalogue of all the things the Ramones do and don’t wanna do (“I don’t wanna follow you around, I don’t wanna have to chase ya, I don’t wanna run away”). It’s all in the spirit of latter-day psych and garage like Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Total Control, but with unimpeachably good playing, the product of all those real guitar-nerd years. And it all sets the stage for fireworks of the last song on High Bias, the epic-length 11-and-a-half-minute blaster, “Everybody in the USA.”
As much as we’d all probably collectively like to forget it, this is an election year. Polizze came of age in the bandanna-in-the-Levi’s-back-pocket Springsteen ’80s, down the road from Asbury Park. You can’t put USA in the title of a song now and not think about these things, at least a little bit, I suggested. But while Bruce Springsteen may have called “Born in the USA” “the most misunderstood song since ‘Louie, Louie,’” Polizze isn’t that worried about it. “Something that seems profound and epic also can just be rock ’n’ roll,” he said. “A lot of music to me is a pulse, it’s a beat, and then you sound everything out after. It’s a feeling, it’s a heartbeat. What’s going on around you, you soak up in response, and we’re in these weird, ominous times. But you can also read into it or not. People can also take it like an Alice Cooper song if they want, you know, like ‘School’s out for summer.’ ”
Sometimes that’s all you need, an anthem. “Yeah and if you’re out somewhere drunk singing it live, you just wanna sing along and spill a little beer on yourself and fist pump, you know?”
Purling Hiss kicks off a U.S. tour on October 29 at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn; see the full schedule here.
