Polly Panic

Polly Panic - Painkiller
POLLY PANIC
Painkiller
(Greyday)
The duo thing is almost played out in indie rock these days, but it’s amazing how all it takes is one little twist to make it sound fresh again. Portland’s Polly Panic consists of Jenette Mackie and Jesse Sprinkle, the latter on drums and the former on vocals and cello. Mackie takes advantage of the big fiddle’s lower ranges, digging deep into the strings and extracting dissonance and beauty in equal measure. On “Little Girl,” “Mother” and “Pretty Pissing,” Mackie rants as her cello raves, while Sprinkle thrashes angrily behind her. There’s an artistic aesthetic here to which PJ Harvey fans will no doubt relate, but Mackie’s skillful cello work and the raw nature of the arrangements set Polly Panic apart from its influences and on its own lonely plain. Ugly beauty personified. Michael Toland - Michael Toland

Polly Panic - Painkiller (CD, Greyday, Pop/rock)

The music of Polly Panic sounds something like a cross between PJ Harvey, Rasputina, and Janis Joplin. The band is driven by the talents of singer/songwriter/cellist Jenette Mackie.

Painkiller collection of recordings that allows the listener to focus on Jenette's vocals and cello. The main difference between Mackie's material and the music of PJ Harvey and Rasputina is the fact that many of her songs have a decidedly bluesy feel.

Her vocals are intriguing in that they are rather loose and spontaneous. Though this twelve track album is a bit of a hit...we have the feeling that these recordings are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what this lady is capable of producing. An interesting glimpse of things to come... (Rating: 4++) - babysue

CD Review: Polly Panic, 'Painkiller'

Courtest of Greyday Productions

3 out of 4 stars

Polly Panic's debut album, "Painkiller" was released in early October. "Painkiller" is laced with distorted cello, manic-depressive drums and throaty vocals. The combination is pretty dynamic, especially if you like your music a little violent and bipolar. The lyrics read like a Sylvia Plath book mixed with a little Gertrude Stein.

If you're a fan of Cursive, Murder by Death or The Stiletto Formal – you'll definitely be appreciative of how much a cello can add to the pot and by how much it can totally rock.

Polly Panic is Jenette Mackie, who trained at The Crane School of Music in New York. She left and studied manipulating the classic cello into a darker sound.

Perfect for: People who are tired of guitar solos and power chords.

Pod Picks: "Plathian Fashions," "Acid Rain," "Soft Witness" and "Red Dress" - The South End

Polly Panic/Painkiller: Greyday Records

Filed under: Reviews — leftofthedialmag @ 12:24 pm

She might have uprooted herself from the slate gray money machination world of Herman Melville’s New York to the drizzly Interzone of Portland, OR, but this is urban decay that feels like the Brooklyn Academy of Music being hit by a ship loaded with rocket propelled grenades: bursts, staccatos and burn baby burn hiss and flare with squeezed out howls from hell. She readily admits a tireless affection for writers/painkillers incorporated, Sylvia Path and Virginia Wolf, though Panic’s musical pathways could easily be dubbed twisted, micro-muscled, classical chaos that relates as much to Neurosis, the Melvins, and the Swans as much as to any lithead preoccupations. This is sanitarium stuff that digests a bit roughly, best in small but still lethal doses, like “Soft Witness,” in which she declares her readiness to “redesign your disarray,” and I believe her because there is very little solitude from her weave of avant-garde modalities and brow pounding, loosely brandished rock heavy rustscapes. It’s uninhibited, naked, guttural, and shambolic.

Mostly less heavy but more evocative, “Plathian Fashions” even has a subset of slightly Patti Smith tongue rollicking in places, though higher pitched, with Panic flaring here and there like a dying volcano or a trauma voice migrating from strength and fury to despair and searching the next, even alluding to Plath’s “Bell Jar” in a moment of suffocation. “Mother” unleashes the uncertainty of walking alone when mother could not, focusing on the generational fog that keeps us questioning our ability to cut the umbilical chords and the cognitive cables that form the not-so-soft machine of our survival. We’re the saplings, frozen things, ready for thaw, she suggests, if the fear can be peeled back and the predatory life forms around us exiled forever. The same pulse returns on “Little Girl,” where our identities are still questioned among the days when “razor burns will be your steady love.”

There is one common currency: abrasion. We are poc-marked by years of pain breeding, and the song is not a prayer but a hex demolition zone, where the pitched battles for identity, grace, and survival can finish off the hordes of memory vampires that feed on us. The songs never really declare their own spaces; in fact, they meld and melt into vignettes with a mucous membrane still attached to each, with “Pretty Pissing” revisiting the disaster of this breeding, trying to grapple with the alphabet of reason, which has no place in the mongrel heart of love, where she has “learned to hate” and sit pretty “between my lines that I could never find.” This played part, this persona, has become almost biological, having become a second skin, the training so perfected that it need not even manifest itself beyond its deep interior dwelling. This too is the locus of “Royal,” though with a gothic undertow emanating purple rooms, lullabies, and lies holding exclusive sway, reminding me of Plath’s “Daddy,” where the nursery puns on the woman in the shoe eventually give way to dad’s Hitler boots. When she drops terms like “paint us beautiful” on “Paint,” you can smell the reek of turpentine, the psychopathological forays, the grief genesis, and perhaps there is a brief, numbed solace under the spell of the “Acid Rain” falling in the last song, for porous bodies have already been warped and drained, our glassy isolation from the “normal” world exploded into fissures that can be read like small, terrorized mythologies. Not for the faint and feigning. - left of The Dial Magazine