Hit

I realized something about myself the other night: I would pay money to stand around and drink beer in a packed rock club even if the only entertainment was a live Guided by Voices recording. I haven't done so, yet. However, at the local rock club earlier this week to see Swedish psych-rockers Dungen, I was pleasantly surprised at the choice of between-band house music: A live GBV show, I assume recorded at this same club, pumping over the speakers.

Because the show was likely recorded through this same board and originally blasted from these same speakers, the only thing keeping it from sounding like a real GBV show was the lack of live drums. It was bracing, and I realized that it would be thoroughly enjoyable to join a packed club of GBV fans to swig beer and bounce around to a GBV show, even if it was an artifact rather than a performance.

One difference? Without the crush of people and the noise they bring, I was able to actually pay attention to what Pollard said and the band interplay. It was early in the show, so you could understand what Pollard was saying and singing, which was a plus.

I bring this up because one of the songs I heard was "Hit." It's a song I glossed over for quite a while when listening to Alien Lanes (easy to do, of course; on an album of impossibly short songs, it is second-shortest at 22 seconds. "Cigarette Tricks" has it beat by four seconds for the title). Coming as it does between "Motor Away" and "My Valuable Hunting Knife," two relative epics (and singles), it got lost.

The same thing happens in concert. Sure, Pollard introduced it, so you knew what was coming, but given the more frenzied tempo of a live show, the song probably was there and gone in about 20 seconds, long enough for a friend to ask what it was Pollard had slurred just before and for you to shout over the din for him to repeat the question. Then it's gone and you have to ask your companion what it was they'd played.

But when you take the time, you realize it's a perfectly encapsulated pop song. There's a verse and a chorus of sorts, and it's all one big hook. On record, the band seems a bit startled that this is all there is, crashing to a close when Pollard signals for them to stop. Live, they've learned to stop on a dime and launch into something else.

Lyrically, it's a strange little tale, seemingly introducing another song in its opening line: "This is called 'The Coming of Age,'" and then perhaps announcing the arrival of a band (or who knows what, as Pollard sings, "Coming into town with the giggling faggots." The reference is so quick and so silly that it's hard to be offended. Then, someone -- one assumes it is the gigglers from the preceding line -- is "starting blizzards and other weird weather patterns." Then the perspective changes as Pollard declares, "We participate in the shit." Is he one of the gigglers? Or an observer? Either way, he boldly proclaims "Now that's a hit!" Does he mean the song he's singing? "The Coming of Age"? Something else? One imagines him cranking out his better tunes and stating "now that's a hit" at several points in his career, so perhaps it's nothing more than a vehicle to get that oft-uttered line in song.

Evil Speakers

The best part of "Evil Speakers" occurs in the first five seconds as the drums and guitars start abruptly and Robert Pollard sings "I am breathing, yet I feel no sky." It's not as if it's all downhill from there, but the promise of that first line is never really fulfilled. No one expects a verse-chorus-verse thing from Pollard at this point, but the nice little verse that starts the song never really goes anywhere. The shift from verse to chorus is so subtle as to be non-existent, leaving the song as 54 seconds of musical foreplay without release.

Ex-Supermodel

Once you figure out what it is, is there any way to ignore the snoring that rumbles away in the background on this track? I'm hard pressed to do so. Listening to the album on a stereo or in the car, I'd never really noticed it, chalking the sound up to the lo-fi recording that dominates Alien Lanes. But hearing it on headphones, it became obvious that someone was sawing logs into a well-placed microphone while the tape rolled.

Regardless, the real debate is this: is the song made more interesting for the inclusion of Robert Pollard's buddy Gary Phillips' snoring, or is it a distraction that mars an otherwise decent song? I can argue either point depending on the day.

On the "more interesting" side, the snoring is kind of like the blasts of noise and other song snippets that are dropped into some of Pollard's more experimental work. The jarring juxtapositions are intriguing as they snap you into focus during an otherwise pedestrian song. Hearing the snores does just that for a pleasant but unremarkable song.

On the "distracting" side, it's a good song, though certainly not in the top tier of the album. Nice moments abound: The lyrics are minimalist; if I had to guess I'd say it's about pleasuring oneself to the image of a supermodel in a magazine (key line: "I exploited her, became the groom"). Not sure what the following lines have to do with it ("I write music for soundtracks now") though Pollard's vocal on this bit is transcendent. The snoring detracts from all of this, causing the listener to focus more on the one incongruous element rather than the parts that work.

Verdict? Today, I deem it a distraction.

They're Not Witches

What a perfect, strange little song, the kind of thing one imagines Robert Pollard writing and recording in an afternoon. Here, joined by his brother, Jim, and longtime Guided by Voices bassist Greg Demos, he knocks out a 51 second stunner that is all hook. With a plucked acoustic guitar and bass -- and some double tracked Pollard vocals singing in harmony -- an odd little tale of spoiled little children wrapped to say good morning unfolds. Red ants and mercy giants play a part, somehow, as do the angels of the bars. The key point, however, is that you should not "seek to burn them," because they are not witches. Fair enough.

Watch Me Jumpstart

There are a handful (OK, maybe a heaping handful) of great Guided by Voices songs built on little more than a perfectly simple riff. "Watch Me Jumpstart" is in close competition with "Postal Blowfish" for the title of best of the bunch... to these ears, anyway. It's an insistent yet lumbering riff that chugs along under Robert Pollard's vocal, giving way to the chorus like a raging river bursting forth from a dam, only to be throttled down and back into the riverbank as the next verse begins. Wow, that was a tortured description, but to me, it's exactly what this sounds like.

Watch me jumpstart as the old skin is peeled
See an opening and bust into the field
Hidden longings no longer concealed

The title always seemed a bit obtuse to me, but reading the lyrics, it actually is perfectly straight forward. It's a song of rebirth, of shaking off the old skin and trying something new. Pollard is even clearer in the next few lines, through he introduces doubt about where this new path will take him:

Watch me bulldoze every bulldozer away
Each new obstacle from each old new day
Where it's going it's hard for me to say

Yet he's willing to take that chance, despite the fact that there will be those who try to stop him, be it out of jealousy or protective affection or a mixture of the two. He challenges them to "shoot me down... bring me down," but promises that "I won't be around." Try and stop me, suckers," he seems to say, "but I'll already be gone."

Given the era of the song, it is clearly influenced by his desire to quit teaching and try to make the band work as a career:

I can't pretend to be something I'm not
'Cause I'm a supernova erect and white hot

Thirteen years later, that supernova may have cooled a bit, but it's obvious that Pollard benefited from the decision to quit pretending and indulge his art to the fullest.

Pimple Zoo

Sometimes there is no need for circumlocution or obfuscation: You have something to say and you say it. Other than the non sequiter of a title, Robert Pollard's "Pimple Zoo" does just that:

Sometimes I get the feeling
that you don't want me around.

There. That pretty well takes care of it. If the song wasn't a blink-and-you-miss-it 42 seconds, I'd say the next two lines (heck, the only other lines at all) almost ruin it:

But just when you are waking
Just when the snakes are flaking.

Almost. It's redeemed by that strange slide from arena lo-fi to hi-fi acoustic strum and back, a move so jarring it nearly erases the memory of those lines, leaving Pollard's bit of self-loathing/paranoia/self-awareness intact.

My Son Cool

Having just gone through the arduous process of trying to come up with a name for a new baby (one whose arrival last month is the reason for the deceleration in posts here, by the way), I hear this track differently than others might. In what seems a companion piece to his song "Your Name is Wild," he seems to be making his pitch to name his son "Cool" (Pollard reportedly wanted to call his daughter "Wild"). It can be tough to come up with a name if you don't have an obvious selection based on family tribute or some other historical cause. My wife and I toyed with several, but couldn't agree on many. We settled on Daniel, while Pollard and his wife went with Bryan.

Pollard didn't go down without a fight, it seems. He opens the song with a declaration, seemingly aimed at his wife: "Decide now!" He has a list, "complete without your permission," and "Cool" is at the top.

He seems to lose interest in the idea, however, because by the second verse he is on to typically Pollardian imagery: "Completely the rope has been severed, the night screams for contact and clue."

Closer You Are

It's hard to complain about a song that gets to its hook within the first 10 seconds and continues to hit you with it at regular intervals until the whole thing crashes to a close less than two second later. Of course, on Alien Lanes that doesn't really set a song apart... except for that two-minute run time thing, which makes it absolutely epic.

The songs lyrics, which mostly consist of the titular "The closer you are, the quicker it hits you," seem to me like something derived from a high school stoner party. "Chain smoke rings like a vapor snake kiss, she says she don't know why," Robert Pollard sings. Later he offers, "You play the heavy, it's a real slick movie move, 'Stoned at the Alamo' tonight... Try to be nice and look what it gets you. Now you can see the boys dreaming, scheming. . ." It feels like a report of sorts, a girl who is unsure, a guy putting on the moves and another knowing that the nice guy goes home alone while the others plot the rest of their evenings.

A Salty Salute

It took a long time for me to come around on "A Salty Salute," which probably explains why for a long time I considered Alien Lanes to be a good but not great album. It's far from a typical lead-off track, starting with a plodding bass line that even I could play, drums that have a casual acquaintance with the beat and a hook that is more about intent than actual effect.

By now, of course, I understand the appeal and have hoisted a cold one in solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the Club as Uncle Bob announces his decree: "The club is open."

Regardless of the way the song starts -- I'll always hear "Disarm the sexless" while the Guided by Voices Database and nearly everyone else believes the lyrics printed with the album that aver it is the settlers who are being disarmed" -- it's a clever little tale rooted in some Dayton lore:

Disarm the settlers
The new drunk drivers
Have hoisted the flag
We are with you in your anger
Proud brothers
Do not fret
The bus will get you there yet
To carry us to the lake
The club is open

In Jim Greer's GBV book Guided by Voices: A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll, Pollard explains the song, saying it stems from incidents involving friends of his on an ill-fated fishing trip to Lake Erie, coupled with complaints that people were being picked up for drunk driving as they left the American Legion. "I thought it was pretty fucked up that our country can be like, 'Okay, you did your time serving your country,' and they give you this place called the Legion where you can go and drown your sorrows, and on top of that they're gonna bust your ass coming out of there drunk."

Hence, the shared anger of the proud brothers riding the bus to the club (and an explanation for the previously incongruous mention being carried to the lake).

The song took on much more meaning as it became a staple in Guided by Voices live sets. Pollard acquired a neon sign declaring that "THE CLUB IS OPEN," and the near-fanatical chants of the crowd singing in unison became something like a rallying cry for GBV nation. Surprisingly, to me at least, the song didn't open the final Guided by Voices show, but instead led off the second encore (that's song 57 of 63 for those scoring at home). By then the band was a sloppy mess, and it had been clear for several hours at that point that the club was open and probably running low on beer.

Blimps Go 90

There aren't many bands that can bury a song as good as "Blimps Go 90" at track 22 on a disc. Then again, few bands even get anywhere near 22 track on a disc, let alone have that many good songs in a career. For Robert Pollard? No problem. "Blimps Go 90" is one of the stand-outs on an album chock full of 'em. It's another short, lo-fi song with a monstrous hook... oh, and a teetering violin, of course.

Beyond the hooks and Greg Demos' oddly touching violin part (if he had lessons beyond eighth grade he shouldn't admit that to anyone) are some of Pollard's best lyrics. This song is teeming with great images and little asides. I assume he's referring to an airshow or some other sort of public fair, hitting on the very common themes of flight and nostalgia for days that perhaps never were in his work. He sings of "rifle games for seven year olds" and "pouring punch for the franchise' before quickly taking things in a melancholy direction, declaring the whole thing a drag and urging, "weep, sad freaks of the nation."

His lyrics also provided a name for a decent Iowa band, Aerosol Halo, one of at least a handful of such instances that I'm aware of.


All in all it's just a fantastic little slice of pop during which Pollard is again willing to take off his rose-colored glasses and call it like he sees it.

Gold Hick

"Gold Hick" is among the many sub-minute songs Robert Pollard has recorded over the years, songs that, with few exceptions, are catchy and perfect in their abbreviated state. Such is the case with "Gold Hick," a 30-second song on Alien Lanes. It begins with stuttering, choppy guitar chords (not unlike those that introduce "Postal Blowfish") before the song kicks in with Pollard singing, in its entirety: "All my dumb luck and all my misgivings, I thrust them aside for the dead for the living. I want my vehicle, my saucer-shaped coffin. I'm mighty pro-jet, I'm Baron Von Richtofen."

The only thing obvious here is the reference to Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, the World War I German fighter pilot better known as the Red Baron. What that has to do with the beginning couplet, in which Pollard declares a sort of do-over with the world, is anyone's guess. The ending two lines seem more related, with saucer-shaped coffins and jets and mention of one of the most famous pilots of all time. There actually is a "saucer-shaped coffin" out there, according to this story from the Seattle Weekly, "the Cocoon, a saucer-shaped coffin made of jute, a fibrous plant. It weighs in at $3,500." Might that be related to Doug Gillard's "Malamute Jute"? Who knows.

All of that transpires in about 15 seconds, leaving the final 10 seconds for a bluesy bit of cock-rock guitar soloing. It's a fully contained gem of a song that holds up to many repeat listens.

(I Wanna Be A) Dumbcharger

Alien Lanes was a disc that took a long time to capture my attention. Looking back now I'm not sure why, as it's as good and consistent a follow up to the wonderful Bee Thousand as could be hoped for, let alone expected. Maybe I was distracted by something else, or found what was already becoming a flood of GBV product to be overwhelming. Or perhaps it was simply that these songs, short as they are -- album closer "Alright" is the longest by a long shot, clocking in at 2:56 -- didn't stick around long enough to lodge in my ear, and it took more spins than I was willing to give for them to do so.

Whatever it was, songs like "(I Wanna Be A) Dumbcharger" didn't help. On a disc with as many great songs as Alien Lanes, a dud like this is a momentum killer. To go from the decent "As We Go Up, We Go Down" to "Dumbcharger" to the fantastic "Game of Pricks" is a bit of flawed sequencing at best. Lyrically the song is interesting, and while I don't really consider Pollard's EAT-related efforts to be poetry, this would certainly be better served within the pages of those collections than put to rather boring music here. Pollard's instincts are usually stronger; he is often annoying, but rarely boring.

Always Crush Me

I was long one of those Guided by Voices fans who wished that Robert Pollard would take his band into a studio to re-record some of those lo-fi gems, the hope being that they would perfectly translate to the hi-fi world, be even better and break the band wide. When that happened on Do the Collapse -- including one re-recording with the incredibly hi-fi take of "Teenage FBI" from the Wish in One Hand EP -- the results were mixed, and it became clear that sometimes lo-fi is the best way to present these songs after all.

Hearing the band's output in total now, it becomes obvious that the oddities and quirks of those earlier songs gave way to songs that were more traditional in structure and that had fewer twist and turns. They are good songs, simply different. Part of the shift can be attributed to more sophisticated recording techniques, but even more of it falls on Pollard's shoulders. As he grew as a songwriter, he seemed less likely to rely on quirks and more willing to let his songs stand or fall on the strength of his melodies. The result is a deep, rich and ever evolving catalog.

Despite this acceptance of the natural progression of his work, there is one song that I still wish Pollard would revisit. "Always Crush Me," which first surfaced on a split 7" single with Belreve and later appeared near the end of Alien Lanes, cries out for another look. Pollard seems to be accompanying himself here, his stabbing guitar strum approximating a string quartet sawing away at flurry of staccato notes. Now that Pollard has begun to dabble with strings -- he wrote two short string-only pieces that appear on the Silverfish Trivia EP -- he ought to put those skills to use and take another crack at "Always Crush Me." Even just transcribing the guitar part for strings would be an interesting start, but a talented quartet could find plenty of space for enhancement here, too.

Then again, perhaps Pollard has more on his mind than revisiting a 1:44 song from more than a decade ago that, if a commenter here is right, is about insects. I'd never have guessed that myself, though the last line of each verse makes this interpretation seems as likely as any other: "Always crush me, picture my amazement when it doesn't always pain me, and I will reproduce faster." Regardless, it's a strangely fascinating little song that threatens to get lost amid the bounty of great pop songs on Alien Lanes, but one that deserves a listen, if not a re-do.