Polyphonic the Verbose : ADA
“Have Fun figuring out life,” my mother said to me, a mixture of friendly farewell and a loss of hope tones in her voice. “I still haven’t.”
College wasn’t bothering me, life was—life and its bullshit circumstances. It’s one of those 3-D eye illusions that’s supposed to pop up at you if you just stare at it long enough. You think you know what it is, but never quite sure, because you don’t know if you’re staring at it the right way, or if the whole thing is popping out, or if the damn thing’s upside down and you’re so clueless that you can’t even tell. You ask someone else how to do it, and they’re just as lost.
“Just stare at it for a while,” they say. “It’s supposed to be a sailboat.”
Supposed to be, but no one really knows. They’re just saying what someone told them. Finally, when you think you’ve got the image captured, circumstances smack the congregated effervescent colored picture from your hands, and suddenly the right thing to do is wrong, or maybe not even wrong, but certainly not right.
A review will get myself thinking, I think. Polyphonic the Verbose; dig the name, but I’m sure sometimes people get turned off by it. The word verbose is pretty verbose. The album starts with “Container #473”, a nice song, to gloss over it. It was a sample song that took sounds from random things, sometimes instruments, sometimes not, but it made music. It took pieces of life. It arranged them. There was a pattern, but the pattern changed, and eventually by the end of the song, it was still the same song, but not the thing I once knew. “Moving On” the next track, did the same thing, but now with lyrics. Ideas that played familiar tunes in my head were turned on their heads, and the end didn’t resolve. Things were left open in a confusion, but a beautiful one, not for its stylistic ventures and risks taken, but for picturing everything just as it seems, the perfectly painted portraits of mythological Titans and Gods that answer all of life’s questions by simply being as divinely beautiful as life allows.
The song “Machine With Sealed Inputs” tells all of this best, lyrics filled with self-aware contradictions and the change of vocalists as the singular voice moves through the large classical movements of life of a typical man who has surrendered to life, moving from control, to puzzlement, to just not giving much of a shit anymore, and losing himself, the one thing that is innate, or so we think.
Similar Albums:
DJ Cam – The Loa Project, Vol. 2
RJD2 – Deadringer
Cinematic Orchestra – Everyday