It took a while to get through all three, but the new Robert Pollard/Fading Captain discs have now been fully digested. And, surprising no one, they vary in quality depending on the origin of the songs within.

The best of the three is Blues and Boogie Shoes by the Keene Brothers. It's the latest of Pollard's pairings in which he takes backing tracks recorded by someone and then creates lyrics and melodies to sing over top. In this case, he takes instrumental tracks written and performed by Tommy Keene and finishes them with his contributions. The result is a record that sounds like, well, a Tommy Keene record with his vocals erased and new ones recorded over them by Pollard. Before you post a comment saying "no duh," hear me out. Previous installments found the artists involved trying new things. Mac from Superchunk offered some decidedly un-Superchunkian tunes for Pollard, with the result sounding unlike either man's day job. Pollard's work with former Guided by Voices guitarist Tobin Sprout on two similar discs under the name Airport 5 sounded like early GBV. Similarly, the Circus Devils and Lifeguards projects (with Todd Tobias and Doug Gillard, respectively) sounded more collaborative as well.

The Keene Brothers disc, sounds more like Pollard's work with Phantom Tollbooth on the disc Beard of Lightning. On that project, Pollard took that band's disc Power Toy, erased the vocals and, with the band's permission, recorded new vocals with entirely new lyrics, often in different spots than the original lyrics had appeared. The result was a re-imagining of an existing record. While the songs on the Keene Brothers disc were never released by Keene, anyone familiar with his work can recognize them as his songs. These aren't off the wall experiments; these are songs he simply didn't finish. As such, it sounds odd to hear Pollard shoehorn his vocals into the songs, knowing intuitively how differently Keene would have approached it. That's good and bad, depending, of course, on the execution. Pollard finds ways to mesh well with Keene's tracks on about half the tracks, and feels a bit out-of-sorts on the rest. It's an interesting experiment that still finds this Tommy Keene fan wishing he would have finished these songs himself. His latest disc, Crashing the Ether, is good, but might have been better with a few of these tracks.

The next disc in terms of quality is Turn to Red from the Takeovers. Here, Pollard finishes tracks by Chris Slusarenko, who was the end-days bass player in GBV. Slusarenko offers Pollard some garage-y tunes, and the Fading Captain delivers. At its best, this is the most raw, energetic thing Pollard has done in years. At its worst, it's like the low points on every disc he's ever cut, with half-baked ideas offering ample reasons to hit the skip button. Tracks like "Insane/Cool It" make this worthwhile, however.

The last disc is All That is Holy from Psycho and the Birds. It's the flip side of Pollard's typical collaborations. He found some old tapes of himself on vocals and acoustic guitar on some unreleased tracks, and decided to send them to Todd Tobias to see what he could do. Tobias then recorded tracks around Pollard's basic songs to create more fleshed out work. It's the opposite of the way the two work on Circus Devils projects, but mimics the way they created Pollard's masterful solo album, From a Compound Eye. Pollard obviously sent Tobias some of the chaff stripped away from the wheat that was FaCE, but at its best, the results are at least interesting. One complaint: there is plenty of room on the disc to have included Pollard's original recordings for comparison. Of course, knowing the way Pollard is able to monetize his art, watch for that as a limited-edition vinyl release at some point. Either way, this is more interesting than good, which, given that it represents one-third of Pollard's output this month, is as expected.