In nearly five years of blogging, the number of bands I’ve written about following unsolicited submissions hovers at a rate of approximately one a year. Pollyn, a local dream-pop three-piece, is the exception. For those shopping your demos in overheated cars, here’s how they beat the odds. First of all, it helps when your producer/”sound creator,” Adam Jay Weissman has written songs for UNKLE and produced for Guilty Simpson and Masta Ace (of course, it doesn’t hurt when you have a “Weiss” in your name). Second, you aren’t a hip-hop group but you go to the guy who mixed the Jaylib record to do the honors for your official debut. Third, you front artists like Hot Chip, Nosaj Thing, and Matthew Herbert among the top friends on your Myspace, which doesn’t mean shit per se, but at least means that you have good taste and aren’t some screamo band from Bakersfield who randomly pulled my e-mail address out of a stack of thousands.
When it comes down to putting out a remix album, you avoid the guy who floods my inbox every week bragging “YO HOMIE, CHECK THIS SHIT OUT, I MIXED UP NOTORIOUS BIG WITH PANDA BEAR. I CALL IT NOTORIOUS P.A.N.D.A.” Instead, you enlist white-hot wonky producers like Blue Daisy and dEbruit to morph your Portishead on lithium atmospherics into something relentlessly funky but still eerie and fresh (I’m re-engineering this back into my lexicon, deal.) Most importantly, you’ve got to be good. And in addition to boasting my favorite self-coined nickname for kush, Pollyn are all of these things. Of course, comparing a band to Portishead is a slippery slope, so for the sake of the comment brigade, let’s reference them to Asobi Seksu, if they pulled from hip-hop and beat music as much as they did The Cocteau Twins. Already a KCRW darling, Pollyn get the co-sign from both Sunset Dr. and 1974 Broadway. Listen to their demo or their album.
Download:
MP3: Pollyn – “Still Love” (Left-Click)
MP3: Pollyn- “Still Love (dEbruit Remix)” (Left-Click)
MP3: Pollyn – “Still Love (Blue Daisy Remix)”
