TRACK REVIEW: Polyvinyl – Modern Art People

Polyvinyl’s Modern Art People is a blistering post-modern punk-ballad-punk sandwich. Led by a riveting sneering spoken word vocal that has an inflection of Karen O, Modern Art People offers guitars that have a delicious distortion to them, and with a chord structure that offers an intriguing complexity to the familiar power chord crunch, this track beg for repeated listens, even before the jolting U-turn mid song into a 50s doo wop inspired homage, replete with a slightly manic falsetto oohs in the background.

Polyvinyl capture both those sounds – cool-as-it-gets New York punk and 50s bubblegum – perfectly, and manage to smash them together in a way that makes perfect sense. An absolute headbanger of a tune.