With the truculent ascendency of bands like Yuck, suddenly good old-fashioned Lo-Fi is a valid and admired musical art form again.
Yuck’s pleasantly crunchy and malformed rock is Lo-Fi in its traditional form, albeit one with a little more PR push than I’d imagine Pavement had at this stage in their careers.
But Lo-Fi doesn’t hold exactly the same meaning now.
As an indicator of how “lo-fi” has come to encompass a lot more than the grainy sounds of some thoughtfully-awkward men wearing padded shirts and holding guitars covered in stickers, take a listen to Black Polygon‘s Chrome.
Lo-fi might have nothing to do with the genre of the noise itself any more, although the parallels remain in Chrome, which isn’t only minimalist, but also determinedly unpolished.
As always, such musings appear to damn the music with the faintest of praise, and so it’s important to accentuate the positives – and in Chrome you’ll hear a whole bunch of them – delicately arranged drum-blips, swooshes of jabbering clicks, controlled feedback wails providing the melody.
Black Polygons generate small evolutions in their chosen field – and they’re all hypnotically simple.