Mike Polizze: Around Sound

Album Narrative

“Fast Blues,” the unassumingly titled seventh song on Mike Polizze’s ambiguously titled second solo album, Around Sound, begins with what sounds like an earnestly sung supplication, a sevenfold beseeching of someone named Annie. (It is also, I would wager, the only song you have heard that rhymes the hotel chain “Ramada” with “enchilada.”) But the lyrics betray that it is not a person that Polizze is imploring in this refrain, but rather the empty obverse, a depersonalized blank: 

Any, any, any
Any, any, any
Any, anything
Anything

He is calling out to anything, which might as well be nothing. And yet it still sounds like a good question (albeit one with no answer). Even when the lyrics aren’t actually written as inquiries, the relaxed cadence of Polizze’s singing tends to sound questing, interrogative, an effect that contributes to his songs’ open-ended, present-tense impressionism, their wistful (and willful) lack of resolution. Ironically, the one song title on the album that is in fact phrased as a question, the fleet-fingered “Is There Anybody Out There?,” begins with a contrasting vignette of relative narrative clarity (and another hotel):

Is there anybody out there
That can drag me away
Once a hotel worker
Just wide-eyed stray

As the longtime songwriter, guitarist and singer of Philadelphia psych-squallers Purling Hiss—he also plays guitar in Birds of Maya—Polizze has certainly seen his share of hotel rooms. But having in recent years moved to a small town and become a first-time father, there is an implicit domestic and familial context that permeates these ten new solo songs and the guileless questions they pose (not least of which is how to make a record during a parent’s few and fugitive hours).

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.

This time round, the song structures are more varied and intricate, less bound by predictable shapes and progressions. Tunes suddenly downshift from anthemic rallies into different, loping tempos (“Everybody I Know,” shivering with tremolo), and others seem to elide what once may have been two or even three separate ideas for songs (“You’ve Been Doing Fine,” with its elegantly foliated guitars). Happily, with the increased compositional complexity, the melodies don’t suffer but rather proliferate in counterpoint. Two songs, including the title track, unfold to a full seven minutes, while miraculously managing to retain a sense of effortless spontaneity. Unlike so many of us, Polizze is not in a hurry. 

With the album’s new emphasis on acoustic fingerpicking, there are traces of friends and fellow Delaware County denizens Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn, though only in the sense of shared artistic ancestry, Delco echoes of British fingerstyle forebears like Bert Jansch and Wizz Jones. The arcing, celestial jangle of “It Goes Without Saying” and the hushed, spooky insularity of “Four Celestions”—an ode to the classic British brand of electric guitar speakers, though ironically there is no electric guitar on this album—recall Rain Parade or Opal. But ultimately these recordings dazzle with Polizze’s own easy, lapidary style, characterized by careful patience, studied nonchalance, and quiet yearning, reaching, always reaching for any, any, any, anything.