A lot of Robert Pollard’s snippet-based songs feel like rock opera segments to me. They’re all hook, they have some strange internal narrative and they seem to offer a bridge between other pieces. In the case of Pollard’s, however, they’re often just stand-alone songs that happen to be less than a minute long.
“Cigarette Tricks” is an anomaly even in Pollard’s back catalog. For a guy who has written and recorded dozens of sub-minute songs, this 18-second blast is unique. Just before it, Tobin Sprout’s “A Good Flying Bird” fades quickly, and then the drums crash in and Pollard immediately begins to sing: “Shoot up on the fast lane/she falls like a concrete robot/she’s a boy…” It’s all drum fills and noodling, as if someone recorded a few seconds of the band members all warming up for something, and then had Pollard find a melody and drop a lyric over top.
It’s the perfect intro to “Pimple Zoo;” in fact, it may well be the warm-up to the band recording that song. Makes sonic sense, if nothing else.
One of the reasons that Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout seem so simpatico is that each seems to know how best to complement the other. When Pollard is going off the rails, Sprout offers tasteful harmonies or a well-placed solo, then gets out of the way. When Sprout is carrying the bulk of the melodic/harmonic weight, Pollard usually dials it down.
On “We’re in the Business,” they seem out of step. Sprout offers a songbed that is low-key; it cries out for some Pollard histrionics. Instead, Pollard matches Sprout mope for mope, and the song never really takes off.
The song is interesting lyrically, feeling like some sort of Lovecraftian horror story premise: “We’re bargaining for pardon/ Out of the straits/ Of the madhouse garden.” The “business” at hand seems to be that of aiding people to the other side, whether they want it or not: “And if you fall asleep/
None of us shall weep.”
When I first read the title, I thought of the business of, well, business. Pollard is an entrepreneur under any definition, having worked for others and decided that he would rather be his own boss. Some may scoff at the flurry of releases, high prices, auctions and other endeavors under his name, but the result is probably a comfortable living borne of considerable effort. But that isn’t the business of which Pollard speaks. That was covered on Robert Pollard is Off to Business, a later album that signaled the cleanest break to that point between his past working for others and his present and future as the CEO of GBV Inc.
If that future is to be as bright and lucrative as his past, fewer songs like “We’re in the Business” will help to keep him in business.
It stands to reason that when you have written well over 1,000 songs, you’ll eventually get around to writing about darn near everything. For Robert Pollard that means that a circus populated entirely by germs is an entirely reasonable topic for a song.
In fact, it’s the perfect topic for Pollard: it’s strange, a tad creepy and sounds like something that should have been covered by someone else before but hasn’t. Add the fact that this is a Circus Devils song, which means that Pollard’s lyric will accompany a suitably oddball, menacing songbed created by the brothers Tobias, and the only real question is, “what took you so long?”
Pollard’s lyric reads like the beginning of some commercial jingle:
The germ circus is coming to your town
the germ circus is always around
the germ circus has no tents, no barkers
no cotton candy or clowns
You can imagine a herd of animated “germs” made up like circus denizens approaching the camera in a herd, shedding the circus trappings as they draw near. Why, these aren’t clowns and lions and tigers and strongmen, these are… germs! Then comes the cleaning product, wielded by a determined mom, to sweep them away just in time for her to take the kids to… the real circus!
Nice try. This is Circus Devils. So, instead of the above, we get Pollard taking things in an even creepier tack:
The germ circus is eating up the kids
and the kids are eating it up
Are you coming down?
The noises that back all of this are plodding and ominous (read: Circus Devil-like). Toward the end, it feels like the crescendo in a horror movie soundtrack, the swell before Jason/Freddy/creep of the week lunges out of whatever hidey-hole he was using at the moment to attack.
Thanks to the release of a new 2-disc Tommy Keene retrospective (the unfortunately titled (but a title that Robert Pollard would surely appreciate) Tommy Keene You Hear Me), I have been listening to a lot of Keene lately. I’ve been a fan for two decades, but still, hearing a bunch of his music from across his career, I’m still struck by his consistency. Hearing a new Keene song, I’m often forced to grab the CD case to determine which album and era the song is from.
That’s the beauty of his collaboration with Pollard. Keene provides song backings for Uncle Bob and then things are taken out of his hands. The usual vocal lines and hooks that Keene would typically deploy are left behind as Pollard finds his own way through the songs. At the same time, Keene’s songs are much more intricately structured and conventionally arranged than Pollard’s, which presents a challenge for the singer as he looks for ways to apply his particular aesthetic to each track.
“Island of Lost Lucys” is one of the sweetest-sounding songs in Pollard’s catalog. He chooses to embrace the delicate nature of Keene’s acoustic guitar-driven backing, nestling his vocal in among the plucked notes rather than trying to force something that might have given the song a feel closer to Pollard than Keene.
Keene chimes in with some harmonies on the chorus, adding some sweetness to the mix. This all makes the song sound more vulnerable than it might have been in Keene’s hands alone, and certainly more than one might expect from Pollard.
Over the course of half a dozen Circus Devils albums, Todd Tobias has proven that he can master just about any genre. He hasn’t tackled jazz yet, but damn near every other sound has graced a CD album. With “Pattern Girl,” he offers some radio-friendly post-grunge. From the opening riff, this sounds like a tamer version of something Pearl Jam might tackle.
But Robert Pollard doesn’t take the bait. Instead of a howl or a growl (or even a grunt), he instead offers a spacey vocal that plays to the subdued nature of Tobias’ backing track. While the riff is the thing here, he doesn’t lean on it, but rather plays it with just enough nuance to leave Pollard room. It’s a strangely soothing tune that feels as if it might take off at some point, but it never does. Tobias keeps things reined in, and Pollard keeps his cool in response.
The result is one of the more conventional Circus Devil songs on record. That doesn’t stop him from dropping some delightfully oddball lines, like “I’m giving the sky kaleidoscope eye” and “I’m going to bingo dressed like a gringo.” Later, he declares, “We’ll call it a day/ when the levy breaks and the pen runs out of ink. That shouldn’t occur too soon/ what do you think?”
Fiction Man was the first time that I feared that Robert Pollard would shrug off Guided by Voices and go it alone. Why did I fear it? Because it felt up to that point as if Pollard could have two careers: one that was increasingly polished with GBV, and another that was increasingly strange/experimental on his own. With Fiction Man, if felt as if he was ready to find a happy middle ground between the two (leaning more toward the former) under his own name so he didn’t need to split the profits five ways.
Of course, I needn’t have worried. If anything, he has strayed much more toward what I saw as his solo/strange path, only occasionally taking the time to polish his material to the point where it might be confused with latter-day GBV.
But songs like “Sea of Dead,” with its easy-listening vibe and subtle keyboards, was certainly different from what had come immediately before. Yes, there was plenty of full-tilt rock on the album, but this seemed to signal a definite shift. I know now that this was Pollard trying on one of many, many guises. I also know, after spending a lot more time with his earlier material thanks to this blog, that it wasn’t as unusual as it first appeared.
Regardless, it’s a good song that represents a very fertile period in Pollard’s career. And coming as it did just a couple of months before GBV’s swansong, Half Smiles of the Decomposed, it seems to have been a sign of impending change after all.
After a few atmospheric, slightly experimental tunes, Doug Gillard turns his amp up to 11 and cranks out a riff that would make any boogie rock guitarist green with envy. it’s a ripping start to a tune that gets in, gets it done, and then checks out. Robert Pollard could have done his best (insert name of your favorite punk screamer here) and tried to keep up, but instead, he sounds like an aging hippie, finding a slower groove atop Gillard’s guitar on which his vocal can ride.
His stream-of-consciousness lyrics are relayed with a laid-back vibe, about half-speed when compared to the guitar fury bubbling underneath. He sounds like stoner who wandered into a punk party and was amazed at what he saw but too far gone to do more than report on it somewhat passively:
I’m twenty-four feet away
I hid behind a lamp
They walk into walls
And pretend it never happened
The price is unreal
After remarking on what he has seen, the stone decides that this isn’t quite as bad as he’d first assumed. It’s all a matter of perspective, it seems:
And dumb looks good
In man’s man’s paradise
Follow the bite marks
Do you like something nice?
Look up “power ballad” in the dictionary and you won’t find a single song from Guided by Voices. I mean, come on. Guided by Voices in the dictionary? That’s ridiculous. But, if there was some sort of indie-rock dictionary (and if there was a dime to be made from it, you know there would be), then maybe, just maybe, “Tour Guide at the Winston Churchill Memorial” would be among the songs listed.
From its slow beat to its washes of guitar to Robert Pollard’s languid vocal, the song has all of the hallmarks of a power ballad. Of course, it’s still hard to imagine junior high school couples slow dancing to this at the spring formal, the boys’ hands sliding down their dates’ backs in desperate attempts to cop a feel.
Bob isn’t exactly in Poison territory here, musically, anyway. But lyrically, Bret Michaels would be proud. Pollard’s thoughts about the tour guide at the Winston Churchill Memorial are not pure. After starting with some praise for the young woman and a bit of longing:
Oh, she’s so on top of things
Gone out but so looking within
She’s got her heart pressed to the ground
To extend her knowledge
And I’ll spend my life with her now
Things quickly turn carnal:
She dreams of sleeping now
And how she can take me inside
And now it’s warm and cold
All around
Then, as if the “take me inside” part was too subtle, he, um, drives it home with this: “Be on top of me now.” Forget Bret Michaels. At this point, R. Kelly is taking notes.
By now, those teenage boys dancing are either giggling too hard to do much swaying and groping or have been slapped by their dates for whispering Pollard’s lyrics in the young girl’s ears.