PURLING HISS - Drag On Girard [lp]

It's 2023, and even the turn of century seems a long time ago now - but oddly,
Purling Hiss's guitar-band ethos feels ever more timeless, even as time accelerates
and passes us in the outside lane. The Hiss aren't just a simple part of the tradition
going back 50-odd years. Their DNA, pulsing in waves of punk and classic radio
rock, grunge and slacker, is ineffably, re-singably music - but their signature crushed
guitar harmonics, fused with deep soulfulness, meld into something that cuts us
with fresh heartbreak, an eternal recurrence that seems to be happening right now
today, as it pours off the turntable and runs down the street.
Drag On Girard, the first Purling Hiss album in six years, cruises through these
states of mind and places in time - dreams from the past and the future, careening
lawlessly as they slide around loose on the road, an ever-present youth in their roll.
As before, but with new twists, Mike Polizze and his gang let loose with the chaos
and noise implied by their name, applying high-end splatter and slow-rolling low
end to eight vehicles, running the gamut from gleaming pop gems to head-cleaning
epic jams before they're done.
The Polizze-on-Polizze prototype for Purling Hiss - roiling, space-eating
layers of guitars draped atop the muted thump of freedom rock, all of it squeezing
through the spectrum in a mad dash to be heard - was established way back in the
Hissteria/Public Service Announcement days of the early teens. Now in a fourth
album iteration of full-band Hiss, the genius of Mike Polizze's music, beyond
the obvious - his singing/screaming guitar leads, classic song construction and vivid

hope-and-dream feels - is the shifting layers of Hiss that make up the dynamic per-
sonalities of each album, from the major-label alternative rock sheen of Water On Mars

to the slip-siding

chaos of Weirdon and the shad-
owy 1980s club depths of High Bias. This time out, the

colliding circles of time seem to have inspired both the songs and the band, and the
sentiment-drenched mood explodes in a wild tangle of guitars that seem constantly
about to overwhelm the room.

One of the unique qualities of Drag On Girard is a specific lead-rhythm arrange-
ment of the guitars, emitting the expected formidable roar while setting a certain

type of rhythmic strut for the band. The two guitars style also trips power-pop
impulses in the tunes, with sung-along harmony vocals that evoke classic collective
magic and burnish the tunes one by one. Once this vibe's established, side two turns
around and stretches out with the molten flow of Purling Hiss at their very most
epic; couched within loose improvisatory structures, the title track and "Shining
Gilded Boulevard" play further with the yin/yang of nostalgia and truth as they trade
places looking meditatively back to them old days and all their harshness and beauty.
Can't seem to go home again? Purling Hiss pull it off on Drag On Girard, finding
the invisible places in our shared perspective where it still exists to this very moment.

Vinyl release of Purling Hiss - Drag On Girard [lp]. Released through DRAG CITY and available on LP.