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KELLEY POLAR: I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling [Environ]

There’s something perversely charming about Kelley Polar’s puckish mucking-about with electronica/post-dance conventions. If you can’t dance to it, what the hell do you do with post-dance music? But over the course of I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling, the cool effect wears a little thin. Originally toasted for his creative additions to house releases by the Metro Area production crew, New Hampshire’s Polar dropped a string of excellent singles under his own name in the early years of the new millennium. The song-by-song format is still where he does his best work, and there are a few outstanding cuts on his second full-length. The moody “Chrysanthemum” and the caffeine-jittery “A Dream In Three Parts” work both as deft production showcases and pop songs. But removed from the club or the house-music group settings that provide the best context for the kind of formal experiments Polar attempts here, much of I Need You sounds slight, like a symphony heard through earpiece headphones. At 43 minutes, its charms will be best appreciated by electronica fans knowledgeable enough to appreciate what Polar is doing when they hear it all on its lonesome. That’s not a criticism (the same applies to Kraftwerk, for example), but it means I Need You is best suited to a slim minority, even within the electronica fan base. [www.environrecords.com]

—Eric Waggoner