All nine tracks from Polvo’s first two releases—Can I Ride EP (1990) and “Vibracobra” b/w “The Drill” (1991)—compiled on one LP.
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Check out the first 18 or so seconds of “Can I Ride,” the title track on the first release by Polvo, the two-guitar juggernaut that represented the other side of Chapel Hill indie rock. That two-note riff, and the guitar twang that follows, recalls the opening notes of “The Sprawl,” a key track on Sonic Youth’s epochal Daydream Nation, an album released in October 1988, less than two years before Polvo formed.
This self-titled compilation’s nine tunes are not quite the sound of a torch being passed, but they were a sign that Sonic Youth’s weird tunings, the hardcore punk and proto-indie rock on SST Records, and R.E.M.’s hazy rock (three big influences on this era of Polvo) were changing lives.