Aunique and unstoppable two-man outfit, Sydney’s Polish Club have been absolutely tearing up the Aussie gig scene over the past 12 months.
Coming together just a couple of years ago, singer and guitarist David Novak and drummer John-Henry Pajak have really settled into their fun, fast rock niche, unveiling their massive single ‘Beat Up’ late last year and more recently releasing their latest effort ‘Come Party’, all in the lead-up to their debut album Alright Already and a national launch tour.
One of the truly special things about Polish Club is that what you see is what you get – just two guys absolutely shredding and having the greatest time doing it. “There are some things on the record that we don’t do live, but everything that’s recorded is either me or John playing it,” says Novak. “If I need to do another guitar line I’ll just overdub it myself. We’ve got a general rule where we don’t want to add anything that people are going to miss live, so there are no extra melodies that you would be missing if you went to see us live.”
Both ‘Come Party’ and ‘Beat Up’ are pretty fast, even by Polish Club standards. But the album itself isn’t made up exclusively of tracks played at speed. “All of the singles we’ve released have been pretty breakneck in terms of tempo,” Novak says. “We’ve got these two gears, which are super fast and loud, and the other one is relatively slower but still loud. There are a few, for lack of a better term, ‘slow jams’ on the album, and we had a couple on our EP and we’ve been playing them live.
“So if anyone has seen us live or listened to the stuff that’s not played on the radio, they’ll know that we have that extra gear that allows us to hold back a bit in terms of speed. I think the album is more varied than people will expect.
“You want to use a fun song for a single and I’m always in two minds because I want all of our music that we release as singles to reflect what we can do as a band, so I guess the challenge for us as a two-piece is we’re always limited with what we can do. But that’s also the fun part because we have to work within our restrictions.”
Another remarkable characteristic of Polish Club’s music is that most of their singles so far have barely broken the two-and-a-half minute mark. Novak explains that at least part of the reason is related to their lack of stamina as a band, but with the experience of the past two years under their belts, Alright Already features some longer cuts.
“I use the word ‘comfort zone’, but it’s pretty fuckin’ far from comfortable when we play it live,” he laughs. “Look, John and I aren’t the fittest specimens in the world and before this band we hadn’t played live shows this often.
“I had hardly played live shows at all, so by virtue of that we’ve ended up with super short songs that are super loud and to-the-point, and if you watch us live you’ll see that we normally play them a lot faster than they are on the record, and that’s all we really know how to do. Having said that, there are a couple of songs that do break the three-minute mark – they are more mid-tempo and slow tempo.”
Polish Club’s music, and Alright Already in particular, harks back to a time when rock was dominated by references to funk and soul. Interestingly enough, the band never really intended to pay homage.
“I don’t really think about where this style of music is coming from,” Novak says. “I know John sometimes comes in with a set idea of the type of song he wants us to write, but I only know what we can do well and the kind of song we can write where it sounds believable. People think we’re ’60s and ’70s soul music connoisseurs and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know all the standards. I think I just resonate with that general vibe.”
One of the big challenges about heading back on the road after the album release will be to remake their live set, which is something they’ve gotten down to a fine art over the past year.
“It’s funny because the album is a mish-mash of songs we’ve been playing for a while and it’s also got a few songs that are pretty fresh, songs that we wrote the chorus for recently,” says Novak. “We haven’t played a few of them live before, and it’s interesting now because we’ve played so many shows in the past year that we got our set to a stage where it was just on autopilot, and we could just turn it into a show and get really silly with it – just go mental and not have to worry. And now we’re in a place where there’s so many songs to choose from, we have to try to make a whole new set.
“So we’ll be changing a lot of the set for this upcoming tour, and most of that will be from the album.”
Alright Already by Polish Club is out now through Double Double/Universal, and you can catch them at Oxford Art Factory, Thursday May 4 and Friday May 5.
