Poly

...shucking and jiving through their quirky, old-time twee jubilee of jazzy pop tunes straight out of the postmodern American songbook. Watching the trio of multi-instrumentalists — mostly former Hotpipe Dan Sommers — pull from a seemingly bottomless bag of ukes, banjos, percussion bits and noisemakers of which The Spin does not know the names is a pretty dazzling spectacle in and of itself. These intricately yet minimally orchestrated ditties, fashioned after a long-gone era, get heavy on the chops but otherwise stay light and fancy-free — given the fact that none seems to concern anything much heavier than scissors, cats and sidewalk chalk. - Nashville Cream

Anyone who saw Les Miserables in concert at Mercy Lounge back in December knows that local musician and MVP Larissa Maestro has a voice like a damn Disney princess. Her newish project, Poly, puts the aforementioned pipes on full display, as she and fellow ubiquitous local side-folk Dan Sommers and Eleonore Denig play sweetly quirky little ragtime-, classical-, showtune- and pop-inspired numbers on a wide assortment of instruments — cello, kazoos, ukulele and melodica among them (That's a melodica, right?). They filmed a performance of "Sidewalk Chalk"... at Joel McAnulty's (De Novo Dahl, By Lightning!, Phantom Farmer) home studio, Phantom Farmercy. Poly will release a pink 7-inch vinyl on Aug. 7, and they'll celebrate with a show (also featuring Cortney Tidwell and Natalie Prass) at The Zombie Shop Aug. 4. - The Nashville Cream

"The crowd seemed apprehensive about folk music being played in a place more known as a garage-rock mecca than anything else. Unwilling to break the invisible barrier formed by the two-man camera crew (aka Poly frontwoman Larissa Maestro's parents) and a pile of toy instruments in the center of the room, the uninitiated looked as if they weren't so sure about this whole Zombie Shop thing. Until a few folks bravely stepped forward, most of the crowd hung back by the merch booth, eyeing the ongoing Duck Hunt and Soulcalibur games by the bathroom and shifting uncomfortably. Poly gathered us all in a circle around their pile of instruments and bade us to shut the hell up. Instead of setting up onstage and playing through a PA system that may or may not have caught fire at least once, Poly went fully acoustic in the center of the garage.

As much as our inner snotty teenage punk hates us for it, we really dig Poly. Maestro, Eleonore Denig and Dan Sommers have managed to weave together something that is poppy on a primordial level. It's pure, uncut, '60s-style chamber pop, fraught with references to Cary Grant and covers of Henry Mancini and Buddy Holly songs. These sorts of things can go one of two ways: It either turns gooey and saccharine, like a Zooey Deschanel movie come to horrible, musical life, or it winds up being perfectly charming, successfully walking the tightrope between cute and cloying. Poly, thankfully, fits neatly into the latter category. Terminally polka-dotted but never precious, the band hints at something playful and childlike without ever bending toward self-aware irony." - The Nashville Scene