Kelley Polar I Need You to Hold On While the Sky Is Falling
With his second album, Mike Kelley (a.k.a. Kelley Polar) has entered into a small pantheon […]
With his second album, Mike Kelley (a.k.a. Kelley Polar) has entered into a small pantheon of electro-pop conceptualists inhabited by the likes of Matthew Herbert and labelmates Metro Area. I Need You to Hold On While the Sky Is Falling buttresses moments of dance-floor purity like “Entropy Reigns” (à la Depeche Mode) with the likes of “A Dream in Three Parts,” based on melodies composed by Romanian romanticist George Enesco (which winds up sounding a bit like The Communards). This is pop that borrows from Philip Glass while retaining an electro-egalitarianism: Is it always successful? No. Is it always beautifully, courageously ambitious? Hell, yeah.