Throat of Throats

Having not paid as much attention as perhaps I should to Mac McCaughan's Portastatic project, I had unfulfillied expectations for his collaboration with Robert Pollard as Go Back Snowball. I was ready for a punk-pop throwdown; I got a drum-machine fueled bit of bedroom pop. I like the results, and now that I've caught up a bit with McCaughan (particularly with the beautiful and quite compelling Be Quiet Please CD from last year), it is completely in keeping with where he's at musically these days.

"Throat of Throats" was one of the songs that first threw me. Built on an obvious drum machine beat, some quavering keyboards and minimal guitar strumming, the song is slight with a subtle hook. Pollard, contributing vocals and melody, doesn't overwhelm things, but he is able to find ways to do more than others might with the tune. He's dealing with the call of the wild here, singing about "insects feeding and zebras bleeding."

It's a nice song -- damning praise, perhaps, but true -- on an album that probably challenged Pollard as much as any of his collaborations. McCaughan offers few obvious big hooks on the disc, yet as evidenced here, Pollard is up to the challenge.