De La Soul’s long-awaited arrival on Spotify, Apple, and all the rest has gathered headlines aplenty, but there’s another streaming debut that many Twin Cities music fans will appreciate.

When Polara signed a major label record contract with Interscope Records in the mid-’90s, the Minneapolis dream pop quartet was poised to lead a new wave of Twin Cities musical acts to emerge on a national level.

Frontman/guitarist Ed Ackerson’s previous band, 27 Various, had broken up in 1992. Polara wasted no time making an impact with its self-titled debut album, originally released in 1995 on Clean Records, a subsidiary of famed local label Twin/Tone. Not long after, a “bidding war” ensued that led to the band signing to Interscope.

“Ed and I were very close and in close contact during the bidding war,” recalls John Strohm, Ackerson’s friend and collaborator credited on several Polara releases. “He hired [very recently deceased] manager Gary Smith after the first Polara album … It was thrilling for all of us to finally have so much industry attention on Ed’s work. This happened during a very brief window, between ‘93 and ‘94, between Nirvana’s success and the homogenization of the Alternative Rock radio format, when labels were placing bets on what sound might be the next reinvention of rock.” 

Around that time, PD Larson vividly remembers hearing Polara’s “Counting Down” while listening to Rev 105 in his car. “After the song they said, ‘That’s the new single from Minneapolis’ own Polara.’ “I was stunned!” he recalls. “I was a big fan of a lot of the progressive sounds coming out of the U.K. in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, what we now call “shoegaze” — all the Creation bands, My Bloody Valentine, and the like. “Counting Down” seemed to have all of that rolled up into one with a uniquely bold futuristic edge. … Polara was in the right place at the right time and they were very much leading rather than following.”

The band put out two full-length records for Interscope, 1997’s C’est La Vie and 1998’s Formless/Functional, as well as the Pantomime EP in 1996. But in the years that followed, those Polara releases were never made available for streaming on digital platforms.

That exclusion didn’t sit right with many, including Strohm. Now a music lawyer, Strohm’s experience in the record industry had included playing in successful indie rock bands Blake Babies and the Lemonheads, as well as later heading up Rounder Records for the Concord Music Group.

Appealing to the right folks at Universal Music Group — the massive conglomerate that now owns and oversees Interscope’s back catalog — was a challenge, no matter how many close ties in the music industry he has. He wrote a persuasive email highlighting Ackerson’s passing in 2019 due to pancreatic cancer and the importance of his legacy.

“I underscored that he meant a lot to certain communities and that his circle wanted to have the opportunity to share tracks from all his releases when we talk about Ed’s work,” Strohm says. “It had to be rooted in passion and personal interest, and getting it done relied on leveraging Ed’s heartbreaking story and letting them know that people actually care about the music. Without these efforts, it would likely have taken years for them to get around to it.” 

His sincere pleas found their way to a UMG exec who fortunately “happened to be a musician in a band with a friend of mine,” Strohm explains. Eventually, they gave him the digital release dates this year of Feb. 3 for C’est La Vie and Formless/Functional, and Feb. 10 for Pantomime. Now Polara’s entire back catalog (including their post-2000 output on their own cooperative label, Susstones) is available on digital streaming platforms.

“I would hope that people being exposed to Polara's music today for the first time will realize just what a force of nature Ed was,” says Larson, who became Susstones press agent and Ackerson’s longtime friend. “He was so good at everything: player, singer, composer, engineer, producer, label head, band leader, scene supporter, guiding light. And then hopefully they'll go down the rabbit hole and discover 27 Various, The Dig, Ed's two amazing, criminally underexposed solo albums, BNLX, and Capricorn One. We live in an age when physical media is transitory and often erratically released. For better or worse, the digital realm has a sense of permanence to it. It really is a wonderful thing that Polara's catalog is now digitally etched into stone.”

Here’s a look back at the releases newly available for streaming.

Pantomime

When diving into Polara’s music, it’s best to start with the pristine shoegaze, psych-rock, wall-of-sound production, which Interscope entrusted to Ed Ackerson instead of a big-name producer. When their major label debut was taking longer than expected to record, the band decided to release a stop-gap EP, Pantomime.

The pulsating, slow-burning title track kicks off with Ackerson’s sneering lyrics evoking a rough night at the Minnesota State Fair. “Wasted in the wasteland, crawling towards the grandstand, you gotta make your own fun.” “Idle Hands” and “Light the Fuse and Run” also appear. The only song from Pantomime — other than a reworked “kinder and gentler version” of the title track — that didn’t also find its way onto the forthcoming full-length was the somber, Spiritualized-like psychedelia of “Confusing Times,” which hints at equating the restless uncertainty of an intimate personal relationship with Polara’s ascendance to a major label — and the inevitable confusion that awaited them.

C’est La Vie

When C’est La Vie finally did arrive, it proved well worth the wait. No bands from Minnesota, or anywhere in the Midwest, sounded remotely like Polara did in 1997. They seamlessly fused spacey shoegaze with lo-fi psych-rock. The swagger of classic rock meets the gritty edge of post-punk, and the songs have hooks galore provided by Ackerson and guitarist/keyboardist Jurgens, over the driving rhythms of bassist Jason Orris and drummer Peter Anderson. The album kicks into high gear with “Transformation,” with the band boldly stating their grand career ambitions over a churning mix by the legendary Alan Moulder.

“Sort It Out” bounces between a dreamy, keys-laden trance groove and a relentless catchy chorus, with Ed ripping a brief but blistering solo, never showing off and always in service to the song itself. “Light the Fuse and Run” was Minneapolis’ answer to the boozy pub anthems of the BritPop scene that exploded in England in the mid-’90s. There’s a heady mix of slower, more contemplative jams like “Quebecois,” “So Sue Me,” and the wistful closer “Shanghai Bell,” where Ackerson threatens to “take the first bus home,” alongside more rollicking, guitar-fueled freakouts like “Make It Easy,” “Incoming,” and the simmering churn of “Elasticity.” C’est La Vie is, quite frankly, one of the best records to come out of the Twin Cities in the entire decade of the ‘90s. But Interscope didn’t see it that way.     

“By the time C’est La Vie actually came out it seemed Interscope had moved on to different genres and different strategies that didn’t include continuing to heavily invest in Polara, despite their massive investment,” recalls Strohm. “It was disorienting and deeply disappointing. However, Ed was the only truly responsible signed artist I knew, because he invested the windfall in Flowers Studio, which became his livelihood.”

Formless/Functional

With Interscope seemingly looking in other directions to find the next new thing, Polara were free to take a lot of creative chances. The results make for an experimental, adventurous album. The staccato drum and bass rhythms of leadoff track “Whassup?” hint at those endless creative possibilities as the vocal asks, “Anybody know where we’re supposed to go? We can take this anywhere you want.”

Some of the songs on Formless/Functional clearly come from the same lengthy recording sessions for C’est La Vie, while others were clear departures. It’s a more subdued collection than their last record, but it proves to be a more cohesive listen. Rather than shoegaze and post-punk sounds, Ackerson instead looked to the emerging U.K. electronica scene in England as he incorporated muted big beat and techno sonic landscapes into his propulsive new style. “Got The Switch!,” “Verbing,” and the dubbed-out “Midtown Greenway” would sound more at home in a rave tent at Glastonbury than the more familiar confines of First Ave.

There are also plenty of tender, optimistic moments making for a reflective listen. “Halo,” “Peaking Charlie,” and the Lennon-like “Semi-Detached” all contain a genuine vulnerability that made Ackerson’s songs so appealing and easy to identify with.

Interscope dropped the band after this album amid a corporate merger. Polara’s (and, Ackerson’s, by extension) legacy is still alive in this music, ready to be discovered anew each time you drop the needle on his records, play the CDs, or cue up songs now available on the streaming services.

“Polara’s story is not unique; many bands signed huge deals and never enjoyed any real market success. But it was a lot for Ed to process, and it changed him in many ways,” Strohm notes. “But unlike so many of his peers, Ed did not have the propensity to be bitter or feel victimized. He found new ways to be creative, to serve other artists with his great skills and creativity, and to establish himself as one of the pillars of a vibrant music scene in the Twin Cities.”