Polysics
We Ate the Machine
MySpace Records
By Jose Fritz
Like most indie-snobs, I first noticed Polysics in 2001 with their album Hey! Bob! My Friend! Their yellow hazmat bodysuits were endearing and very reminiscent of Devo, which was intended. The album was 33 minutes long and left a crater inside my brain. The pace was like some kind of super-charged surf rock, and the mood was more than manic.
Fast-forward two decades, Japan continues to deliver. Synthpop splinters loose from punk into a myriad of subgenres: casio-core, disco-punk, and hard IDM. We’re in the middle of a synth-punk resurgence, haunting, beautiful, and ugly. Polysics stands alone in the melee as a statelier band who preceded the movement by a decade.
It’s this start in the mid ‘90s that I think keeps them dipping into a catalog of videogame samples and effects. Tunes like “Rocket” seems to be built from the A and B buttons of the SNES. It’s a strange arena indeed. The track “Punk & Lion” reeks of Frampton and takes us down into the slobbery tube of the vocoder-like talkbox.
The birth of punk is something I consider often in my meandering music criticism. My personal thesis is that the musical form of punk is a primitivization of rock n’ roll. But rock itself was just a well-scoured blues structure. So in this theory, punk becomes a red-headed stepchild, the furtive malformed boy in the barn so to speak. Despite this common dual etymology, Japanese Punk was wholly unfamiliar when it began to ooze across the pacific. The Boredoms epitomize this idea with their sludgy pounding rethink of Black Flag. Polysics does this with their own exaggerated interpretations.
I have to give Polysics some credit, as they’ve never pushed the noise envelope too far. They stopped short of that great discordant grey area that runs along the median strip of dance-punk. They’ve always had a pop core that was all-too ironic to be an accident. They never used vocoder, never ironically sampled Billy Squier, never rapped never said “more cowbell” and never break-danced.
Their synth-centric approach to punk veers wildly away from the new-wavish Cocteau Twins and Survivor. Over the years Polysics have oscillated between their foreign and domestic influences. Yes, Devo is a clear and strong influence, but so are the more artsy and less accessible Hikashu. Polysics’ consistently high-speed approach to the genre makes it all but impossible to compare them to other earlier synthy acts like Jerry Harrison. Their absolute rejection of all things mid-tempo leaves them with no peers, past or present.
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