Newcastle’s Polarsets were all over Breaking More Waves in 2011 with songs like Morning, Leave Argentina and the cowbell banging Sunset. Soon they’ll be all over your TV (in the UK anyway), as another song we’ve featured - Sunshine Eyes - gets used on a Boohoo.com advert. But enough of the past, because we’re all about the new shiny future and Polarsets return with Just Don’t Open Your Eyes Yet, a hear it once and you’ll know it synthy summery jam. It pretty much does what every other Polarsets tune does; gets your body dancing as if someone has wrongly wired your insides. It’s probably worth having a shower with the cold tap turned to maximum nearby because you’ll probably need a cool down after this one.
Sometimes you just can’t get enough cowbell can you? We can’t on Morning by Polarsets, a track that swept around the blog world last year like the out of control brushes in Fantasia. Now the good (no make that great) news is that the song is due to be released through Neon Gold, the New York label that we fell in love a while back when they threw out a succession of credible pop tunes, starting the careers of Passion Pit, Marina and The Diamonds and Ellie Goulding. Maybe more recently Neon Gold haven’t quite pushed the Breaking More Waves buttons with all of their releases, but with Polarsets they’re back on the game. This Newcastle three piece got our pulses racing at The Great Escape in Brighton back in May and then we went a little bit giddy on Twitter, proclaiming our absolute love for everything Geordie – from the angelic indie of Let’s Buy Happiness to the ethereal majesty of Lanterns on the Lake to the beautiful folk-miserabalism of The Unthanks. Although this blog is based on the south coast we feel a strange affinity and love for our north eastern cousins. Maybe one day we'll move there and just spend all of our time salivating over the great bands this area seems to be able to effortlessly produce.
So here’s the deal. If Morning doesn’t get you dancing, then please check your pulse because you are probably dead. Assuming however that you’re very much alive and don’t want the party to stop then check out the b-side Sunset as well. It’s Morning version 2.0, with even more percussion, more sherbert high energy, more carnival joy and more hip-swinging freshness. Polarsets are designed to make you freewheel to the indie dancefloor, so what are you doing still reading ?
Taking the indie-dance template to frantic new levels of hands-in-the-air-laser madness Geordie boys Polarsets new single Sunshine Eyes was premiered on Breaking More Waves earlier this month. Now it’s remix time. Not any old remix though. First there’s Kid Adrift who drops his usual heavy synth rock beat laden intensity to deliver something gently fluttering and floaty and just a little bit flirtatious. Like all the best sex Kid Adrift’s version is in no rush to reach a climax, but when it does it’s euphorically blissful and huge, yet it’s not necessarily the climax you would expect. The Kel Skies mix is a more obvious weekend starts here dance floor banger; sweaty, pulsing, ready for boys to pull their tops off and dance gurning with fists clenched. That just leaves the most absorbing of the three - the Jensen Sportag mix. It starts with what sounds like an electronic tap drip and a tension building bass sound before it slowly finds a groove whilst all sorts of oddness goes on around it.
Having already supported the likes of Ellie Goulding, De La Soul, Everything Everything and Fenech Soler and having won a 150-act-strong competition to play Wickerman Festival the band are headlining their own tour in late April / May. No south coast date though boys? Shame on you. Sunshine Eyes dawns on April 18 through Kitsune.
Ever since the second summer of love in 1988-89 and the rave explosion it’s been ok for UK indie music to strut its way with arrogant cockiness to the dance floor. From Primal Scream’s classic Screamadelica to the more modern hip-spasming grooves of the likes of Friendly Fires and the debut Klaxons album, indie kids have been rollicking to ‘avin it large beats and necking clarity destroying drugs on the dance floor.
Electronic, indie, British, alternative, pop, indie pop, synthpop, electronica and electro are some of the tags Hype Machine uses to describe Breaking More Waves. It also uses female blogger, which we would strongly debate, but maybe Hype Machine thinks that because of our tone*. We need to learn to swear more and get excited about scrum down rock thrills perhaps?
But in applying these tags Newcastle’s Polarsets fit the Breaking More Waves bill very nicely. If we were talking genres then Polarsets would be indie dance – or more specifically rhythmic- indie-cowbell-trance. If you want more then let’s put some bands up for comparison. We’d suggest that Polarsets are part of a musical family created by a love in between Friendly Fires and Fenech Soler at a late night rave. However, maybe the best classification of Polarsets sound comes from their own Facebook page, where they describe themselves as ‘Ibiza Indie’.
From the picture above we can deduce a number of things about Polarsets. One – that there are three of them. Two – that they are all male. And three, without having even heard a note, they like synthesisers. Our powers of investigation are quite immense, we think you’ll agree. Burrowing even deeper we have discovered that in ten years time the band want to be on a beach in Cuba drinking Budvar waiting for Pixie Lott to get ready for their night out, that they are inspired by people who dance like no-one is around and that before they became Polarsets they jammed in a prog rock band called The Preserves back in school. We can discover all of this very easily because Polarsets, rather cleverly and unlike many other bands, have chosen a name that is easy to Google.
Polarsets produce shiny twisting funk-filled rave that should guarantee them moments of summer festival hedonism, as their two initial singles, the tropical cowbell groove of Morning (recorded over a lunch of seafood pizza) and the heady punch-the-air disco nursery hooks of Leave Argentina show. British indie dance kids, they're for you. Let’s dance like no-one is watching.
* Since this blog was written over a week ago before posting, Hype Machine seems to have stopped classifying us as a lady, which is kind of good to know - we have certainty now.
