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.