Polhawan – No Sweat

Tim Rowing-Parker has been around the Breakfast Records operation long enough to have produced, arranged, and mastered a sizable chunk of its back catalogue — first as Woahnows, then as Immy, and now under a new name. Polhawan is his debut EP project, and “No Sweat” is its lead single, out ahead of Wild Mountain Time (May 14, Breakfast Records). The name change signals a shift in intent: more structure, more polish, but still self-recorded — Rowing-Parker built a home studio specifically so he could catch songs as they came, rather than drag them into a professional setting and watch them lose something in the process.

“I feel like a song is never as honest as when it’s first written”, he says, “and the longer it takes to record it, the further it gets from its true feeling.” That philosophy is audible in “No Sweat”. There’s a looseness to it that feels earned rather than accidental — a riff that could slot comfortably into the Nuggets or Pebbles compilations without sounding like pastiche, fuzz and organ stacking up underneath Rowing-Parker’s freewheeling vocal until the whole thing crests in a final crescendo. Breakfast Records describe the EP as finding strange but arresting ground between Parquet Courts and Fairport Convention, which is an unlikely pairing that “No Sweat” more or less justifies.

What I love here is how naturally the slacker-rock looseness and the folk instincts sit together — there’s no seam showing between the two. It’s the kind of track that sounds like it was easy to make, which is usually the hardest thing to pull off. Worth keeping an eye on Wild Mountain Time when it arrives in May.