Siberia

Ambitious and inviting, Siberia puts Polvo in a more accessible place while remaining faithful to its artistic vision.

A tremendously satisfying and thunderous effort, and their finest work to date.

With so many of its songs employing fade-outs, Siberia also has this palpably unplanned feeling, which doesn't always pay off.

With Siberia, their first effort in four years, they’ve reversed their polarity, finally hardened into simple, elemental rock goodness.

Siberia recaptures the exciting invention and fire of a lost album recorded between Today's Active Lifestyles and Exploded Drawing without a hint of any decade but the one we now sit in, plus whatever is going to musically transpire in the future. [No. 103, p.58]

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.

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.

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.

Siberia reaffirms just how brilliant this lot can be.

In truth, every twist and turn, every tempo change on Siberia is evidence of the group's unabated thirst for adventure. [Oct 2013, p.55]