Today's Active Lifestyles

THIS IS a massive album. In the sense that it is sprawling, falling, tipping all over the place.

It is recklessly driven by guitars which take bends like a paranoid takes a friendly warning. Inevitably they crash through something wallish, ending up as the present of a lifetime for your favourite electronic tuner. And still they play on, in that fine American frontier's guitar-man fashion. They are trekking indeed, across a bog of sound, with leaking tunes and mad, mad ideas.

It's great! I love it! Demented, off-key, out of tune, off and out of its heads, rummaging around in the distorted gutter of badly beaten up and left for dead melodies, *Today's Active Lifestyles* deserves a room in a madhouse. If Polvo were to look for references, they should bring a revolver, an AK47 and much beer and whiskey with them, and perhaps after two years dogged searching, they might get Sonic Youth and The Flaming Lips to sign or signal something. Polvo sound like Sonic Youth might if Sonic Youth untuned their untuned guitars.

This album is a reflection of what makes rock'n'roll such a vibrant and essential cultural flag in a century that is eating its own arsehole. (Wow!) Under normal circumstances a producer would have a seizure and an engineer a hernia listening to the master tapes of this stuff. Let's call it rehearsal room music. Polvo, like so many of their American comrades, seem to be rehearsing for some almighty end-of-the-world bash. Maybe they've got the timing wrong - they certainly have the tuning wrong anyway - but whatever, this sort of music, in all its oddities, has a relevance.

And if it hasn't, what the hell, it's only rock'n'roll!