Way back in my freshman year of college, a MySpace tour came around to my bumfuck, middle of nowhere Catholic institution with Say Anything and HelloGoodbye headlining.
For a college that attracted nothing but Christian acoustic trios and third-rate comedians for outside entertainment, this was a monumental event. Absolutely everyone went to this thing. Except for me.
At the time, I was just getting into Say Anything, but HelloGoodbye was the absolute bane of my existence (and my recent ex's favorite band), and there was just no way I was gonna put myself through that kind of emotional torture just to hear “Alive With the Glory of Love” and that one other song I kinda knew and liked. So I missed out.
The next day, the band people were talking most about wasn't Say Anything or HelloGoodbye, but the oddball opening act: Polysics. Descriptions varied from person to person, but the consensus was that they were a weird group of Japanese people in matching jumpsuits, and “Matt would've loved them.”
For some reason, I'm just now listening to them for the first time. Long story short, they were right.
It's hard to imagine this band playing live at a 200 year-old Catholic college, not to mention performing alongside such conventional bands as Say Anything and HelloGoodbye. Nobody does insane manic energy like the Japanese, and this is as perfect an example as any. These guys are unhinged right off the bat, launching without hesitation into an insane mess of noisy synth goodness that always seems a half-beat away from spinning completely out of control. It's Devo on crack, basically, with a little less new wave and a lot more punk attitude, and the end result is incredibly satisfying.
The number of influences packed into Polysics' sound is ridiculous. The drums and bass pound away with solid offbeat precision, an army of synths churn out waves of fluctuation digital chaos, and the frontman barks out distorted chants and screams with the power and drive of every great punk shaman that came before him. It's crazy and beautiful and funky and discorrific and I love every second of it.
The more I listen to this album, the angrier I get that they were actually opening for HelloGoodbye. Polysics have been playing damn near constantly since 1996, yet they get stuck playing with some shitty synth-pop act that's gonna be forgotten in a few years (if they haven't been already). Just hearing the words "shimmy shimmy quarter-turn" is enough to piss me off--imagine having to stand offstage as a few talentless fucks got an entire college campus jumping around and singing their bullshit songs, while just a few minutes earlier they had been staring at you without moving a muscle? I'd sure as hell be questioning my career choices leading up to that moment.
I can't imagine Polysics giving a shit though. They clearly inhabit a musical universe all their own, one HelloGoodbye couldn't even comprehend, and that ought to be enough to let them sleep well at night.
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