Purling Hiss – Weirdon

After years of recording in the otherwise uninhabited world of his home studio, Purling Hiss mastermind Mike Polizze recruited a team of rock’n’roll rovers to help him explore a grungy new galaxy on last year’s excellent Waters on Mars. That album made clear that a world teeming with life had been lurking under the previously scuzzy surface of his songs and seemed to herald an extroverted new era for the band. Instead of continuing along the same trajectory, however, Polizze headed back into his basement to record its follow-up by himself. Somewhat surprisingly, Weirdon is neither reclusive nor alienatingly idiosyncratic, but rather contains the Hiss’s catchiest collections of songs to date, as if Polizze wanted to prove wrong anyone who suspected he couldn’t pull off weirdo pop perfection on his own.