Pitchfork Forkcast: New Music: Kelley Polar: "Entropy Reigns (In the Celestial City)" (Live on "Fair Game") [MP3/Stream]

New Music: Kelley Polar: "Entropy Reigns (In the Celestial City)" (Live on "Fair Game") [MP3/Stream]

Photo by Jimmy Edgar

Given the classical mien and new agey themes of I Need You to Hold on While the Sky Is Falling, I almost expected Kelley Polar to do his live gigs wearing Of Montreal makeup, possibly while clutching a monocle. Turns out the Juilliard-trained avant-disco wizard looks a lot like any other guy, his performances as passionate as his influences can be effete (it's the rest of his band that dresses up). Of course, we don't get any of those visuals in this mp3 of Polar doing boy-girl duet "Entropy Reigns (In the Celestial City)" on PRI's show "Fair Game", but nonetheless it's an impressively faithful rendering of a studio version that sounds like, as Mark Pytlik put it, "an ambitious tangle of vocals, strings, and synths that conjures up Human League, the Free Design, and 'Reading Rainbow.'" How does it feel? Polar tells you, over and over, and then luxuriates in a swirling coda of string stabs, rippling synths, and his own disembodied vocals. Listen to the full show here.