El Camino Media. Availability: CD, Double LP and Digital. Time, 67:31.
In 2009, 9 year old Kelli Mayo and five years older Peyton Bighorse found themselves living in the same house when Mayo’s father moved in with Bighorse’s mother. A child and a mid-teen suddenly forced together, that should go well! The result should have been a jealousy fit lasting years, especially given the young Mayo’s sometimes disturbingly precocious nature. There is a glorious early interview with the pair on YouTube in which a then 12 year old Mayo sounds like an over-verbose philosophy professor, while Bighorse resignedly rolls her eyes.
They can actually be a hilarious double act in interviews. In a discussion with Amby in 2016 the pair were asked to sum up their bandmate in one word. Bighorse went first and her word for Mayo was “genius”. Mayo’s for Bighorse was “nurd”. Bighorse, did a visible double-take before calmly coming back with “I guess I should say creative genius, not all round genius”.
What actually happened is that the two formed a band, and not just some kiddiewink Pop covers group, but Skating Polly, a Punk band. Fifteen years later, they’re still together: now with younger brother Kurtis, as drummer. Not surprisingly, Skating Polly were recognisably a kids’ band, albeit a good one, on their first album, 2010’s ‘Taking Over the World’. But each subsequent record has got better and they quickly became seriously good.
The band produced four more full-length albums before Covid hit, plus a number of EPs. The latter include the wonderful 3 track ‘New Trick in 2017, which was made in collaboration with Louise Post and Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt and contains the song ‘Hail Mary’, a feminist anthem that is particularly close to our own hearts because this website was named for one of its lyrics: “Hera says what a waste, I should be the star now”.
Five years and a global pandemic after their last album, 2018’s ‘The Make It All Show’, Skating Polly have come storming back with their most ambitious record to date. It’s huge, at well over an hour in length: a double album, no less, on vinyl. It’s also a more open, mature and candid collection, as befits two women who are now well into their twenties. It’s only a shame there’s no lyric sheet included with the CD (although they are available on-line) because it’s clear a lot of thought went into them.
Quite a range of often very personal topics emerge. In opener, ‘Baby On My Birthday’, Mayo talks about the difficulty of getting attention as a middle child in a large family. She yearns for a vanished past in ‘Masquerade’, talks about hurting someone who has been good to her because she fears they’re too good for her in ‘I’m Sorry For Always Apologising’. Perhaps above all she faces the confusion of her own queerness in ‘Girls’ Night’ where she asks if she’s in danger of becoming a predator on her own kind.
Meanwhile Bighorse deals with what she’s described as a ‘quarter life crisis’ in ‘All The Choices’, with the sudden and potentially overwhelming responsibilities of adulthood. She berates a patronising, controlling boyfriend in ‘Hush Now’, a title that reflects his trying to silence her as a woman. There’s a memory of real-life unrequited love in ‘Charlie’s Brother’ and her bitter, if long moribund, relationship with her father in ‘Not Going Back Again’.
Likewise, there’s an impressive range of musical styles on display here, which takes us far beyond the Punk of their beginnings and means that despite the album’s length, it retains an excitement throughout that never comes close to growing monotonous. It’s all Rock but with so much stylistic variety and nuance – sometimes combined within the same track.
To give just a few examples, ‘Baby On My Birthday’ starts with a Country tinge, but then blasts off into Hard Rock. ‘Hickey King’ is unashamed Punk. ‘All The Choices’ has a 1960s Pop feel, while ‘Booster Seat’ sounds rather like a lounge singer on afterburners at times.
‘Hush Now’ has an R&B flavour. ‘Rabbit Food’ is harder Rock. ‘Singalong’ is virtually Heavy Metal and ‘Send a Priest’ is sort of Punk-Metal.
It’s not all fast and furious, though. There is enough slower, more evocative material to break up the flow a little. ‘Tiger At The Drugstore’ is a power-ballad. ‘Something Like A Friend’ is a gentler, really beautiful ballad, while ‘Man Out There’, a song about stalking (real or feared), is downright sinister.
Oh and some of the songs are just fun, most notably the album’s closer, ‘Party House’, for which the band recruited most of their family to give the atmosphere of a genuine, of possibly somewhat inebriated, party sing-along.
Double albums may seem like something of an anachronism these days, when so many people buy/stream music as individual songs without troubling themselves with albums at all, at least as anything other than a menu to be picked from. In the past they have all too often been a negative sign: of ego clashes and poor band discipline in weeding out songs that really aren’t good enough to release.
All I can say is that none of that applies here. There are no fillers on ‘Chaos County Line’. Quite the reverse: every song deserves its place. This is an explosion of creativity: Skating Polly’s best album to date, and it’s a great step forward in the sophistication of their playing and vocal harmonising, while still retaining every bit of their usual excitement. We loved it.
Hera Says.
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Hera says I should be the star now 