Father is Good

Every song on this album that is any good at all makes me lament the choices Robert Pollard makes. Why base a recording on a lo-fi boombox cassette when you could strip that out, add a real vocal and end up with a decent track? Instead, Pollard is content to take old work, pass it off to someone else and then release the results. It's certainly easier for him, but it gives short shrift to his songs.

"Father is Good" is not a great song by any stretch, a riff rocker of the type that Pollard can likely crank out in the time it takes to play it. But it's not bad, either, and leaving it in the shape it's in on All That is Holy does it a disservice. For all intents and purposes, this is a covers album, with Todd Tobias covering Pollard. The only thing keeping it from being such is the presence of Pollard's lo-fi, unintelligible vocals and nearly inaudible acoustic guitar.

Given a better vocal, this could have joined "The Killers" on Standard Gargoyle Decisions. As it is, however, it's just a curiosity and a shadow of what could have been.

Late Night Scamerica

I know things have taken a negative tone here lately, but the songs that inspire me to write have been far from Robert Pollard's best. In the case of "Late Night Scamerica," that isn't necessarily the case. It's a good song, but the presentation is lacking, making it a very frustrating listen.

As previously explained, the Psycho and the Birds project finds Pollard's producer/sideman Todd Tobias recording music around some of Pollard's boombox demos. Rather than have Tobias do what he usually does, which is to record a song and then have Pollard come in and record new vocals, Pollard chose with this project to let his original recording suffice. While it sounds interesting on paper, it's the laziest possible process, and the music suffers as a result.

"Late Night Scamerica" is a prime example. Pollard wrote a decent melody (it's lo-fi presentation here is so buried by Tobias's work that it would be hard to say for sure, but the stripped-down version on Suitcase credited to Alvin Haisles, proves it) and Tobias has created a nice little chugging rock full of fuzzed out guitars to go with it. As such, it's fine, but imagine how much better it could be if Pollard took another crack at the vocal, maybe even, gasp, recorded a harmony vocal. It would be as good as nearly everything he's released under his own name in the three years since.

The Killers

"The Killers" offers an interesting look at the way Robert Pollard and Todd Tobias work together. It first surfaced on All That is Holy, the first album from Psycho and the Birds, a project that found Tobias augmenting some Pollard demos that featured his guitar and voice. The base of most of the songs is hard to hear, and the success or failure of the finished song, while based on whatever Tobias found as inspiration in Pollard's skeletal structures, largely rests on what Tobias was able to come up with. In this case, it's a song that doesn't necessarily support the front-cover notation -- "File Under: Hard-on Listener," a decidedly Pollardian double entendre that mixes juvenile humor with spot-on commentary.

While wildly prolific, Pollard also seems loathe to leave behind things that might be worth revisiting in higher-profile (and higher-fidelity) arenas (witness "Fair Touching," a song from the Fading Captain EP from Lexo and the Leapers that subsequently led off Guided by Voices last stab at the big time, Isolation Drills). Hence, "The Killers" was resurrected for another Pollard/Tobias project, the Pollard solo LP Standard Gargoyle Decisions. The song fits well as the lead-off for an album that was seen as the more rocking, experimental side of Pollard's then-current sound, the yin to Coast to Coast Carpet of Love's yang.

The song isn't much different here; it still begins with Tobias' inspired '80s guitar solo riff before dropping into a greasy groove over which Pollard sings with menace about "the killers" who are "coming to get you." It's a more muscular, hi-fi rendition, with Tobias able to create the song bed without worry of needing to keep a Pollard demo audible in the process. And Pollard, giving a full-throated performance as opposed to knocking out demo, projects much more, giving the song some heft that it understandably lacks in the earlier version. The latter take runs about 30 seconds longer, much of that given over to a noisy collage that is a fitting end for this angular little celebration of destruction.

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.