Wiki
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Release Date
29 April 1996
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Length
16 tracks
Exploded Drawing is the third studio album by American indie rock band Polvo. It was released in 1996 as a CD and double-LP on Touch and Go Records. The album was engineered by Bob Weston.
In 1999, Pitchfork ranked it at #68 on their original “Top 100 Favorite Records of the 1990s” list, though it was later excluded from the updated version published in 2003.
In the years following the band’s reunion, the album has been viewed in a much more positive light, and has often been called their best. The Line of Best Fit called it a “sprawling double album expanded the band’s sound from the surgically-focused twin guitar assaults to psych, folk, hardcore and all points in between. It felt like an ambitious mission statement from a group not content to simply dole out the riffs to anyone who wanted them”. A Treble review of In Prism found it to “bear the same skill and adventurousness” of this album. Pitchfork called the “epic double-album statement” the band’s “critical peak which saw them successfully unraveling their bee-swarm guitar buzz to explore the polarities of their sound, from psychedelic-folk lullabies to brutalizing post-hardcore.” In a retrospective article on the band’s discography, Louder Than War hailed the album as Polvo’s best & a “masterpiece” which “represents its namesake in every single way.” Sputnikmusic staff member Hugh Puddle similarly described the album as “definitive”, praising the tight performances, “banger” songwriting, “innovative” guitar-work & lyricism. In his book Gimme Indie Rock, Andrew Earles opined that Exploded Drawing “should be put in a rocket or a time capsule as the ultimate proof that indie rock could reach perfection, years into the game, while being so ahead of its time that future generations are still trying to catch up.”
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