The colliding circles of time bring us back to the brink of the Hiss at last. Classic rock singing/screaming guitars fuse with Mike Polizze’s hope-n-dreamz feels and explode into fresh heartbreak, happening right now today, as sweet tunes and crushed guitar harmonics pour off the turntable and run out in the street, just like in the old days.

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.

TRACK LISTING

Yer All In My Dreams
Something In My Basement
Baby
Out The Door
When The End Is Over
Stay With Us
Drag On Girard
Shining Gilded Boulevard

Since 2009 the fuzzing rock power of Purling Hiss has taken many different forms, all emanating from of Mike Polizze’s instinctive approach to playing guitar, writing songs and hooking a feeling from disparate memories, sensations and desired effects. At times carefree and apparently footloose in the world, other times intensely focused and wrathful, Purling Hiss are the orphaned kids of last c entury’s rock and roll generations, lost in a society that has forgotten its way but determined to find their feet again.

‘High Bias’ moves with rageful, dazed humour and soulfulness against the darkening times in which we find ourselves. With no way out, Purling Hiss hit today head on, employing pounding psych rock and punk effects, slipping signature Hissian backup “oo-oo-ooh”s and Polizze’s blistering guitar pile-ups in a full bodied, head ripping brew.

Mike puts together a Purling Hiss album as a whole thing, with songs striking defiant and wistful tones in turn, mixing in odes to impermanence, spite filled rebellion and bemused recollections along the way. ‘High Bias’ kicks off at 11, blowing with first take energy into a mood of ominous portent. The guys that came on for ‘Weirdon’ have grown into a full fledged Purling Hiss, with Ben and Dan feeding off each other, providing fresh rhythm ground for the songs to romp over. This creates seamless motion between disparate styles, from streamlined futurist radiowave to blitzing punk, sweet indie pop song craft and barely-contained group riffage.

Side one closes with ‘Teddy’s Servo Motors’, a Milk Carton Kids / Teddy Ruxpin-haunted fever dream. This was the volcanic headwater of ‘High Bias’, a post-tour jam after the end of the ‘Weirdon’ cycle that pointed the way to a new combination of pop and trash fully loaded with favourite reference points and forgotten ephemera from former eras.

Throughout the album, Purling Hiss modulate styles and inspirations, drawing influence from different eras of rock, treasuring bubblegummy moments (like the incredibly sweet ‘Follow You Around’ and the cheeky ‘Get Your Way’) and mix-and-matching nostalgia for punk, dance pop, no wave and krautrock, all of it melted down into a pleasingly primitive jet of tunage to spray into today.

Album closer ‘Everybody In The USA’ brings Purling Hiss full circle to the repetitive stomp and antisocial fear and loathing found in early recordings, while recalling a misread 80s protest number whose anthemic chorus was used for propaganda despite everything said in the verses.

‘High Bias’ is a brave and bold blast of popular music that lays it on the line to keep the rebellion alive in the streets of our mind. This is rock we will need in our ears as we venture into the darkness and the next unexplored stretch of the wasteland.

TRACK LISTING

1 Fever
2 3000 AD
3 Notion Sickness
4 Follow You Around
5 Teddy's Servo Motors
6 Get Your Way
7 Pulsations
8 Ostinato Musik From Tardigrade
9 Everybody In The USA

Full-tilt with tunes, aggro riffs, feedback peals, stoned soul-searching, pop turnarounds and magisterial portraits of the go-nowhere lifestyle in abstract, ‘Weirdon’ is also a new-phase Purling Hiss album, using the songwriting and guitar style of Mike Polizze to come up with a quicksilver sound touched on only briefly on previous records.

Replete with handclaps, pounding pianos, tambourines and vocal effects, but steeped in guitar roar, Purling Hiss streamlines up nicely, serving the new songs and directions of ‘Weirdon’ while still slamming down hard on your ears like they like to do.

Simultaneously ramshackle and overblown, tactile and free, the early Purling of ‘Hissteria’ and ‘Public Service Announcement’ used DIY limitations to soar through speakers with a new rock sound.

As listeners came gathering and gathering, the call for shows and more shows and then tours became an issue, so Mike expanded Purling Hiss from just his guitar and tape recorder and him into a full-blown trio, capable of lifting heavier than even the records’ thick layers of distorto implied. Now the guitar worked together with the rhythm section rather than fighting it, ‘Sister Ray’-style. In addition to its amazing songs, their previous album ‘Water On Mars’ exploited the bombast of the live, power-trio incarnation but in order to put the next set of songs across, Mike needed to go to another dimension in his mind.

After trading the distant drum of early days for a thick, upfront kit sound on ‘Water On Mars’ - additionally revealing real words attached to Mike’s vocal melodies - Purling Hiss have spread it out again, pushing Mike’s guitar tides over the top, splashing across the drums and vocals. The mix retains a certain clarity nonetheless, even when it matches the crush-and-whine of cheap rhythm sounds with mountainous body, singing leads and infinite distortion layers.

If ‘Water On Mars’ was the Purling Hiss heavy rock album, ‘Weirdon’ travels into the pop dimension of Purling Hiss, making of their fastest and catchiest songs in the abiding images of punk and psychedelia. Written alone to achieve a contrast with the previous album and return in a sense to the original approach, ‘Weirdon’ was made with no concept of limitations on what could be performed live. Mike’s new songs open up, going all over the place, while still based in their home-cooked blend of catharsis and shredding, both in the guitar playing and the inner life of the album.

Full of colour and rock and roll, ‘Weirdon’ is a rainbow of a record; beaming down to the stereos and streets and highways and boom boxes of today, through the unique and still-growing prism of Purling Hiss.

TRACK LISTING

Forcefield Of Solitude
Sundance Saloon Boogie
Learning Slowly
Another Silvermoon
Reptili-A-Genda
Where’s Sweetboy
Aging Faces
I Don’t Wanna Be A...
Airwaves
Running Through My Dreams
Six Ways To Sunday

The Purling Hiss sound is revered by discerning listeners for its devastational waves of guitar rock crashing atop sweet melodies and pile-driving rhythm tunes alike. The effect of these contrasts - in the hands of Mike Polizze - touches buzzing pleasure centres for these listeners with every lick; people who like rock songs and like to sing along and don’t mind a little dirt for their trouble. No matter what the resolution is for Purling Hiss, the devastational waves come on with the same warm, cracked obsession they’ve had from the start.

Mike Polizze bought his tape machine in 1999 (rumoured to be a Sam Ash floor model) and immediately ran himself around the bases. Skipping towards home he wound up in the outfield, crafting sounds, songs, and fragments to cassette for the next several years, never to be the same. It was when he moved to Philly around 2004 and joined up with Birds Of Maya that he was crowned Dizzy, and things began to focus. He had access to all the instruments needed, Birds’ Ben Leaphart drummed on a couple of songs and in 2006 a CDR called ‘Dizzy Polizzy’ came together. Mike made around 50 copies, just for friends, lovers, and the occasional hater, with a cover he silkscreened himself. A few beers and two years later, Purling Hiss became official and took off with three berserk albums released in quick succession. Capitalizing on the newfound demand, Mike made a tour-only cassette of ‘Dizzy Polizzy’ in 2011, combining those original six CD-R songs with some well-fitting additions circa 2007–2009.

Discerning ears will link ‘Dizzy Polizzy’ to ‘Public Service Announcement’ (recorded in 2007) since they were made more or less back-to-back - sweet songs and mini-ragers, a baby version of the squalor that would soon grow too much hair in all the right places. ‘Dizzy Polizzy’ serves up the beginnings, going all the way back to 2004, building off solid, breakfast-of-champion prototypesounds from the likes of Van Halen and Neil Young and head-butting them in a more Purling Hiss direction.

This album reissues the cassette compilation on LP for the first time ever, to tide Hiss-heads over while Purling Hiss work on their next album.