Meet the Polysics. The beautiful impossible super-wonderful 100% Tokyo new wave mutant Polysics. Enigmatic as they are, they've at least given us clues as to what they're listening to. Their website is named Neu! Their latest Japanese full-length is entitled Eno. The cover art of Hey! Bob! My Friend!-- a scraped-up man popping through a serrated tin can hat-- is strikingly reminiscent of Frank Zappa's immortal Weasels Ripped My Flesh. They've been known to don matching plastic safety coveralls and industrial goggles for live performances, garnering incessant comparisons to their self-proclaimed gods, Devo. This junk drawer of band trivia provides a rough outline-- japanoise, grand synthetic fusion, electro-pop, propulsive motorik, and spastic digi-geek new wave. Gradually, they're coming into focus. So meet the Polysics. They've come to make rock uncool again. And they are unstoppable.

Originally founded as a quartet in March 1997, the Polysics (reduced to a trio shortly after their first album) have already released four albums, a handful of EPs, several live videos, a two-disc remix/live album, and scattered vinyls, and have also appeared on some half-dozen compilations. Rumor has it that their trademark hazard-orange "P" can be spotted all over Tokyo, and that their absolutely manic recording energy is merely a spill-off from their dangerously volatile shows.

Their first stateside release, Hey! Bob! My Friend!, is actually a compilation of material culled largely from their first two albums, but you'd never know it. The entire record pulses with the same nervous energy: clinical lab-coat-and-clipboard sterility married to frenetic dork rage. "Sunnymaster" bleeps in with thin, icy drum-machine loops and demented video game melodies before exploding into pummeling guitar noise that's more easily likened to K.K. Null than anything that might, for a moment, be considered new wave. This metallic assault lays the groundwork for the immediate "Buggie Technicha," whose vocoded vocals sputter incomprehensibly over furious riffage, eventually resolving into some kind of metal-surf game show theme.

Zappa's ghost haunts these proceedings. At concerts, Zappa would cup both bands between his legs and make the "big balls" sign, signaling his band to change whatever they were playing into ludicrous heavy metal aggression; he'd twist an imaginary braid on the side of his head and they would shift on the fly into reggae. That kind of stylistic schizophrenia dominates Hey! Bob! Cool electro-pop becomes white-hot noise becomes sloppy, grinding no wave becomes logarithmic computer sequences. Like an atmosphere re-entry in some bad sci-fi movie, everything will be okay, as long as they can just hold it together.

The infectious "Plus Chicker" is jagged and punkish, yet dominated by Hiroyuki Hayashi's (aka POLY-1) loose, high-pitched vocals and Kayo's (aka POLY-3) squiggly synthesizers. "Hot Stuff" and "Married to a Frenchman" pay the most loving tribute to their idols in Devo-- not the quirky, clean, MTV-era Devo, but the brash, no wave-inflected Devo of the late 70s. Beneath the sugary vocals and zipping electronic pops and squeaks lurk fierce percussion and edgy, distorted guitars cranking out measured belligerence. It dances but it bites.

And spaz is king. Hey! Bob! My Friend! simply flails, throbs and convulses with abandon, shifting from Boredoms to Falco and back again at will. One isn't likely to find this kind of frenetic exuberance elsewhere this year. Hey! Bob! sputters and chatters like a toy chest filled with spastic, plastic, blinking, bleeping robots, discharging missiles and spouting digitized catchphrases. Sounds like fun, right? It's as serious as a heart attack.

-Brent S. Sirota, October 12th, 2001