It’s interesting to wonder how Kelley Polar’s Juilliard tutors would react to the crazed backwards-looking synth-mania of I Need You to Hold On While the Sky is Falling. Flirting in equal parts with electro’s ’80s roots, downtown disco and Thompson Twins-style light goth, you’ll love it or hate it, and sometimes both at the same time.

Utilizing keyboard tones and sample pads so brutally outdated they’re essentially ageless, Polar’s pop fantasies could slip onto an ’80s mixtape almost unnoticed. There’s a lot of surface going on — Polar is second only to Patrick Wolf in this department — and while it makes listening to the entire record a struggle, it’s the type of eccentric personality that works best in small doses. Not to mention, there’s very few other artists with as many ideas crammed into one album as Polar uses here, and even though half of them don’t exactly stick, Polar deserves his fair share of props for trying.

Even at its coldest and most alienating, Sky is Falling gives more than a slight hint that Polar — should he play his cards right — just might find inside himself the next incarnation of DJ and producer Arthur Baker. Given the shot in the arm Baker’s string-driven weirdo disco gets here, whether or not you can stand to spend much time in Polar’s universe, it’s worth keeping one eye on disco’s corpse to see what Polar will do with it next.