Suffer the Son

It's anybody's guess what Robert Pollard is actually singing on much of the Psycho and the Birds' disc All That is Holy, but whatever it is, the melodies and guitar strum fueled Todd Tobias to create some interesting songs. What sets "Suffer the Son" apart, both from the rest of the disc and the rest of Pollard's catalog, is the rare appearance of what sounds like a Hammond organ. Keyboards crop up infrequently on Pollard tracks -- or rather, did; Tobias seems to equate "pop" with "keyboard wash" on the albums the two have created under Pollard's name -- and I can't recall any song with actual organ on it.

It's a nice touch here, however, and it ought to spur Pollard and Tobias to look for ways to use the instrument in the future, because it lends a nice bit of soul to his sound. Here, it helps to drive a rather non-descript song that, after the initial words that echo the title, may as well be an instrumental given the complete inaudibility of Pollard's vocal. (I'm clearly not the only one with such criticisms, as one of the main selling points of the subsequent Psycho and the Birds EP, Check Your Zoo, was "vocals a bit more present.")

The Psycho and the Birds stuff differs from other Pollard/Tobias collaborations in that these are built on Pollard tapes that include guitar and vocals. Things under Pollard's name find Tobias using Pollard's demos to create song beds over which Pollard then sings, while Circus Devils music is Tobias creating such song beds from scratch, with Pollard singing to complete them. So here Pollard found a tape with "Suffer the Son" in some sort of lo-fi, guitar and voice form, and shipped it off to Tobias to complete. The result is something almost entirely new, with the man behind the curtain creating something that wouldn't sound out of place on an early Zombies album.