Neon Indian – Polish Girl
Alan Palomo: almost as pretty as James Blake!
[Video][Website]
[6.38]
Katherine St Asaph: Neon Indian’s gimmick here is making songs from actual Game Boy sounds without being called a nerdy chiptune band. That’s the start-up noise, the whole thing is a counterpoint to the Star Maze theme from Super Mario Land 2, and had I played different games as a kid I’m sure I’d recognize more. Congratulations! I’ve related to “Polish Girl” on the most surface level! Unfortunately, I’m not sure there’s much else beneath; it sounds great but no greater than remixers and their flangers have already proven, and the lyrics — what should make this greater — are waffly piffle with as much relation to the longing and shame of missing someone who’s forgotten you as a 4-bit pixelscape on a cracked screen has to the sublime. The guy can’t even commit to delivering them; chillwave fans would be horrified, but “wonder if I ever cross your mind” carried more meaning sung by Lady Antebellum about suburban drunk-dialing.
[5]
Alfred Soto: This exists to incarnate a particular idea of technophilic romanticism: Game Boy beeps and whooshes remind listeners of the golden age of technology, while the indecipherable lyrics and cute voices are intelligible to the under-25 set. As usual, though, these bright lads forgot to program a rhythm or at least something less perfunctory than a preset. That’s when the generic title begins to look symptomatic.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Is this “polish,” like a woman who needs to be spruced up, or Polish as in the nationality? If it’s the latter, there is something to be written about how the coldness of electronic music now sounds far gone, roughed up, against the techno-sheen that was originally what sold it, so attempts like this to make it new again are a failure at polish. Girl or no girl, the failure of refinement makes it interesting. If it’s the nationality, my whole blurb goes up in smoke and I mention how much the boop sounds in the last few seconds are important to the rest of the song.
[7]
Iain Mew: I’ve listened to this a few times and am still none the wiser about who the Polish girl is and what she’s doing, mostly because the vocals are the definition of diffident. That’s not important, though, when the main emphasis of the song is the satisfying bleeping riff that holds it together and the gorgeous washes of sound spread over the top of it. I particularly like how it takes the limitation-powered atmospherics of 8-bit games as its starting point but builds from there rather than just imitating that sound.
[8]
Jer Fairall: For the first time, I can hear how the lazy-seeming “chillwave” genre might actually, at its best, express something like the circa-1981 feeling of discovering and falling in love with all of these weird, beepy sounds. Warm, playful and just good enough that I wish it were better.
[6]
Brad Shoup: So much sequencing and effects in the pursuit of a level coolness. These flashes and arpeggiations are embedded in the culture; I don’t want to denigrate the work that goes into chasing this kind of sound aggregation, but for a track this gauzy, there’s very little meandering. Just like any chart pop hit from the last 15 years or so, nearly every square inch has been zoned for vocals.
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: Maybe I’m just thinking about the video here, but this is a perfect soundtrack to digital reconstruction of memory. Which constitutes at least half of what I, and many other people online, ever do.
[8]
Doug Robertson: This tricks you into thinking it’s a lot more interesting than it actually is, layering bleeps and wash effects all over the place in a desperate bid to distract your attention and stop you realising that they’ve forgotten to include much in the way of an actual tune. It’s music for soulless style bars, where burnished steel reflects back a personality-free face and prominent signs remind the clientele that any character you might possess must be left behind in the cloakroom by order of the management. It’s the soundtrack to nothingness for those who don’t realise they are experiencing nothingness. Like time, it passes, but then, it would have passed anyway.
[5]