Circling Motorhead Mountain

The best thing about "Circling Motorhead Mountain" is the title. It conjures mysticism, the open road and, of course, Lemmy and Co. What we get is something that doesn't make good on that promise. Instead, we get just shy of two minutes of a sturdy if unremarkable riff and a Pollard melody that never takes off.

The song begins with a line sampled from what sounds like a decades-old instructional album: "Thunder and lightning must go together. You cannot have thunder without lightning." That, coupled with the song title, seems to suggest a majestic, pummeling rocker. In the hands of the Tasties, who backed Pollard on this early Fading Captain release (no. 2), it's a fairly generic rocker. It's not bad, but it just kind of sits there.

The lyric doesn't do much either, reading like the flap copy on some 1950s WWII novel's book jacket. "Off the coasts of blackness there are troops backed up, smoking their backpacks, testing the rocks for radio," Pollard sings.

At his best, Pollard can take a great title and then create a song worthy of the name. Here, he's simply average, doing just enough to justify putting the song on a release and nothing more.

Time Machines

It doesn't take this song's inclusion on the Crickets Fading Captain series best-of to indicate that it's one of Robert Pollard's finest non-Guided by Voices tracks. It's a strong enough song that it would elevate any release on which it appeared. While Pollard has released a lot of filler over the years, particularly in this series, no one could accuse him of hoarding his best stuff for GBV albums.

This song and "Fair Touching" are the standouts on the sole Lexo and the Leapers release, the Ask Them EP. Pollard decided to take another crack at the latter, taking it into the studio for Isolation Drills, the result eventually leading off that album. But "Time Machines" remains a grungy, lo-fi glory.

Lexo and the Leapers is essentially Pollard backed by Dayton band the Tasties. The sound is much like what one would expect had the latter-day riff-rockin' GBV been forced to record on Tobin Sprout's 4-track with little rehearsal: ragged but right. "Time Machines" is their finest moment, a chugging rocker that points the way for GBV's core sound for the rest of that band's run.

The song also appears, in a slightly different form with different lyrics, on the first Suitcase boxed set, credited to Ben Zing, and recorded a decade before this one.

Fair Touching

Though Guided by Voices songs by and large aren't terribly complex compositions, neither are they very straightforward. Robert Pollard usually does something with the structure -- be it an odd strum pattern, a herky-jerky beat or an unexpected melody line -- to make even the simplest song inherently interesting.

"Fair Touching" is the rare exception, an incredibly straightforward song built on the kind of strum pattern and drum beat that has launched a thousand and one garage bands. Even Pollard's melody is fairly predictable; not that this makes it bad, but simply that if one were to make up his own lyrics to accompany the backing track, odds are good that the melody would be close to what Pollard offers.

That, of course, is where the simplicity ends. Pollard's lyrics are odd, reading like a capsule review of a children's fairy tale: "Under the iron shop, the farewell ladies wink/Always promising, no one to crush them." The chorus, in which he intones again and again, "The queen's prize awaits, she might rub her legs" always puts me in the mind of some giant bug queen, perhaps an ant or a cricket, rubbing her legs together to create music of its own. The bridge seems like a sly aside from Pollard, a comment, perhaps, to his critics: "Currently fabulous, and perhaps at last the song you sing will have meaning."

The song debuted on the 1999 Fading Captain series six-song EP Ask Them from the side project Lexo and the Leapers. That sounds like an AM radio version compared to the hi-fi reworking the song received two years later on Guided by Voices' second and final stab at the big time, Isolation Drills. It shows up one more time on the two-CD Live From Austin, TX that captures the band's 2004 performance for "Austin City Limits." By that time, the song had become a muscular rocker.