Seb Rochford, drummer, leader, and hairdo extraordinaire of jazz outfit Polar Bear has something of a Midas touch for Mercury Prize nominations. Accusations flung at the prize board for including a tokenistic outsider album in their twelve album nominations. These will hardly faze Rochford, as he’s been represented in the outsider category twice already.
Good money would be spent on backing Polar Bear’s third and self titled album to make it a hat trick for the man. The record sees Rochford perfecting the band’s crossover appeal, merging their particular brand of ‘dream-jazz’ with a range of electronics (from the ambient to the spastic), and setting the album up for mass appeal without sacrificing their artistic vision.
Whatever of that old clich» about judging a book by its cover, Polar Bear prove that album covers most definitely belie the CD within. An acid trip visual of Isabella Rossellini’s lips transposed onto a green-tinted sky, it’s immediately obvious your stereo will soon be pumping out the most singular sounds it has in a long time. There is a transparency to the Polar Bear sound that allows the listener to adapt their songs to whatever style they like. Opening track Tay could as easily be a DFA style funk-punk song to one set of ears, where another hears dreamy jazz in it’s raw state. Goodbye sports industrial overtones with clanks and blips, but is still slinky and sexy in a way the band Throbbing Gristle can’t quite claim they are. A list of the heterogeneous elements that make this album what it is would stretch as far as our next issue if I tried to compose it, but the overall intent is clear: Polar Bear are not to be pigeonholed.
Yet for the lucky dip nature of the album, it is distinctly the work of one intuitive band at every turn. There is no overload of ideas on any one song, and no empty gaps in style or mood between tracks. A sheen of cool-as-fuck reassurance polishes the album up, making the album a rounded off equation and never a sum of it’s far-flung parts. Just don’t expect to get it the first time around.
