Siberia - Polvo
Siberia Image
Metascore
79

Generally favorable reviews - based on 8 Critics What's this?

User Score
9.0

No user score yet- Awaiting 3 more ratings

Your Score
0 out of 10
Rate this:
  • 10
  • 9
  • 8
  • 7
  • 6
  • 5
  • 4
  • 3
  • 2
  • 1
  • 0
  • 0
  • Summary: The second release for the North Carolina indie rock band since they reunited in 2007 is its sixth full-length album.
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 8
  2. Negative: 0 out of 8
  1. Oct 7, 2013
    83
    What makes Siberia so great is that it thoroughly succeeds on both counts--proving once again that, for Polvo, all those years out of the game are to be measured not in inspiration lost, but wisdom gained.
  2. Oct 1, 2013
    80
    A tremendously satisfying and thunderous effort, and their finest work to date.
  3. Oct 1, 2013
    80
    Though the songs here would have fit in with the best of their earlier phases, they manage to inject deeper subtleties and emotional crosscurrents than even their best work from the '90s without getting too soft in the process.
  4. Oct 1, 2013
    70
    Polvo is still doing what they do best. [Aug-Sep 2013, p.93]
  5. Oct 9, 2013
    70
    Picking up where the foursome left off as if the interval between petering out in 1999 and its 2008 reformation hadn’t happened, Polvo rides an eerie sense of continuity that ties Siberia to its bursts of creativity in the ‘90s, with the band still taking seemingly incongruous factors like detuned guitars, Asian-influenced instrumentation, and out-of-step rhythms yet somehow striking on a formula where everything all adds up, now as then.
  6. Oct 7, 2013
    70
    The return of wonderfully abstruse Nineties guitar-benders Polvo might not be the splashiest indie-rock comeback (that distinction goes to their Chapel Hill, North Carolina, homeys Superchunk). But it's one of the finest.
  7. Oct 1, 2013
    60
    With so many of its songs employing fade-outs, Siberia also has this palpably unplanned feeling, which doesn't always pay off.

See all 8 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1 out of 1
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 1
  3. Negative: 0 out of 1
  1. Oct 12, 2013
    9
    I never thought I would be overjoyed celebrating a Polvo album as confident, relaxed, and mature until I heard "Siberia". I was one of the many underground rock guitar fans high on the addictive adrenaline rushes and breakneck stops and starts of Polvo's best albums (Today's Active Lifestyles/Celebrate the New Dark Age/Exploded Drawing) and thought their best days were past when the original drummer left and sound moved into "Shapes" while not as exhilarating, still offered many surprises, a solid album. The band took ten years off for 'real' life and returned to great life performances and a promising resurrection with "In Prism" that depicted a band beginning to re-arrange the holy puzzle pieces of a revered history into something else something becoming...which has now shown itself to be the next chapter in "Siberia" an always fascinating, beautifully unpredictable guitar album to satisfy the faithful and perhaps inspire the curious to give this singularly brilliant band a choice listen. Not a weak song in the set, "Siberia" matches the band's previous efforts, and trumps them even, in being an approachable adventure still woozy on mystery and shadowy surprises as only the impressionistic guitar theatrics of Polvo can promise and deliver. "Siberia" may be Polvo's most unexpected masterpiece, but a masterpiece it is, stretching far beyond the earthly confines of the math rock label they were never meant to bear, as their sound proves far to soulful to be calculating and science for science's sake, It's sound as beauty and always revelatory in its wonderous new guitar frontiers. Expand