Just Say the Word

When Robert Pollard has long instrumental passages in songs, they usually offer some sort of moody scene setting or a bit of wacky experimentation.

With "Just Say the Word," that's not the case. The song is built on a severely strummed electric guitar and what sounds like a 1980s-era Casiotone drum beat. This goes on for half a minute before Pollard begins singing, and for nearly a minute after he is done. It doesn't do much differently at any point than it does at the outset, and it's never joined by another element. The only variation in the entire song is his double-tracked vocal on part of the second verse and a sort of bridge that serves, in the absence of a real one, as the chorus.

On the screen, that doesn't seem very appealing, and it certainly isn't the kind of pop nugget that earned Pollard his reputation as a songsmith. But there is a sort of insistent appeal to the track. Too often, eager to get to the towering tune that is "Subspace Biographies," I skip through this track to get to the next one. Spending time with it now, I'm drawn to it, impressed with what Pollard can do with such spartan elements.

Gold

An artist with as many surefire pop nuggets as Robert Pollard would be expected to front-load his albums, sticking an uber-catchy track at the beginning to hook listeners. While that is often the case, it's certainly not a rule, and "Gold" from Pollard's first major post Guided by Voices release is a good example.

The track is fairly strange, given the rather muscular psych-pop that populates most of the disc. It takes a long while to get going, has no chorus per se, and forces the listener to concentrate. In other words, it's the perfect opener for a double album designed to relaunch the career of an artist who promises to explore the sounds of pop, punk, prog and psych.

The song begins with a guitar strummed through a tremolo effect. Another guitar adds a bit of bass, then Pollard begins to sing a bit lethargically --perhaps, given the subject matter, resignedly -- "Tell us, oh lies again," followed a bit later by the great line, "and I never ever met a day I didn't like, but there I get squat."

As the first verse closes, the song builds, with some percussion adding a plodding beat and some additional keyboards and guitar rewarding a listen through headphones. Pollard's vocal takes on an urgency here as he sings, "And I may feel justice in the water; and I may just try looking down everybody!"

The gold in this case is for sale, as Pollard shouts (in character), "Gold, Baby! You may set foot upon this godless terrain."

By the end of the song, with the original guitar strum almost completely subsumed by the other sounds around it, things have taken on a swirling sheen of psychedelia that gives way to the angular punked-up thrust of the short track "Field Jacket Blues," the bouncing pop of "Dancing Girls and Dancing Men" and (you guessed it), the slightly proggy "Flowering Orphan" that follow.

Cave Zone

I've been down on Robert Pollard lately -- or at least on his recent work -- and if you're looking for song zero, the one to which this antipathy can be traced, it's "Cave Zone." It's a plodding song with no real hook, but I'd forgive that (somewhat) if the lyrics were at all interesting. They're not. If I wanted to hear an old guy complain about the world trying to infiltrate his little man cave in the basement, I'd ask my dad to write a song.

Every time I hear the song (and that's not often, given the lackluster quality of much of The Crawling Distance), I sing my own lyrics, full throated: "Lame song! Someone turn it off, this old lame song!"

I've been an all-or-nothing fan of Pollard's who has stuck by him through thick and thin (I'm still trying to like Nightwalker... really), but the artist, who has issued so many great, boundary-breaking, hook-filled, genre-scoffing tunes that absolutely blew my mind on first listen, positively breaks my heart when he puts out dreck like this.

Up the Nails

While Tobin Sprout's song beds for the Airport 5 project are almost universally compelling, he threw Robert Pollard a curve ball on some by not offering easily recognized verse-chorus-verse structures. That's part of what makes the songs so consistently rewarding simply as instrumental creations, but it forces Pollard to be more crafty when creating melodies and lyrics.

On "Up the Nails," Sprout offers something that could stand on its own as an instrumental, and Pollard responds by improving on that with a solid melody that grafts verse and chorus together in a chain of subtle hooks. Though the music doesn't change appreciably, Pollard knows when to turn things up a notch, building up to the line, "But how can you believe/ that patience brings reward?"

It's hard to pinpoint where it happens along the way, but the song slowly builds in intensity over the course of its run time, giving Pollard's vocal a sense of urgency.

Girls of Wild Strawberries

Reminded by the Guided by Voices Database site, I realized that I saw Guided by Voices for the last time five years ago today when the band played at Gabe's Oasis in Iowa City. I knew at the time that, barring some unforeseen circumstance, it would be the last time. Robert Pollard already had announced the break-up, and the New Year's Eve show at the Metro in Chicago already had been booked. I was pretty sure that life would get in the way of making it to that one, so this was my last chance.

As I recall through the fog of memory (and beer), it was a typically great show. Pollard was in fine form, punctuating the set with long discourses about the state of indie rock and the band's place in it. He was clearly disillusioned and disappointed with the band's lack of commercial success. If I had written even a handful of Pollard's best songs, I'd be willing to chuck it all, too.

Songs like "Girls of Wild Strawberries" are a fine example. Though still two months from release on the band's swansong, Half-Smiles of the Decomposed, it sounds like a cover of some old psych-pop chestnut, testament to the timeless quality of Pollard's best work. As with the occasionally maligned "Glad Girls," Pollard has crafted a catchy song from a very basic, repetitive riff. I have no idea what the lyric is meant to convey; I assume it has something to do with the Ingmar Bergman film "Wild Strawberries," but having never seen it I can't say. Regardless, they are married to a gorgeous melody sung by Pollard with conviction. Add Doug Gillard's note-perfect guitar solo, which sounds like it could have been lifted from a volume of Nuggets, and you have key evidence in the case of Guided by Voices v. The Taste of the American Consumer.

I don't remember hearing the song at that show five years ago, though I know it was played. the GBV database set list reports that it was played 10th on a 48-song set, meaning Pollard was probably only two beers into his on-stage consumption and therefore fairly coherent. Pollard said often at that time that he knew it was time to quit because the band had made the perfect GBV record. That's not exactly true, of course, but it is a solid album, more solid than any other 15th album in the 18th year of a band that I know of (that's a joke, folks). Pollard has written dozens of songs the equal of "Girls of Wild Strawberries" since, but few have captured what makes the song so special, and chain of evidence leads right back to GBV. It may seem strange to say so of an entity that changed so much over the years, but I really, really miss this band.