Heaven's Gate

I thought I was intimately familiar with every note on the Keene Brothers' Blues and Boogie Shoes disc, but when "Heaven's Gate" just popped up on the iPod, I didn't know what it was. It took a minute or so for it to register, which happened when Robert Pollard launched into what passes for a chorus and Tommy Keene plays a nice little descending figure on his guitar. For whatever reason, that's the hook that stuck in my mind here.

Perhaps the song simply suffers from placement. Coming as it does just before the much stronger "The Naked Wall," I must have looked past it too often and it suffered for it. Then again, though it's a fine song, it's far from the disc's best, and it simply doesn't make the cut of my mental laundry list of great BABS tracks.

It does have the distinction of being the most keyboard-heavy track on the disc. Keene has always had a way with tasteful keyboards (something Pollard could learn from), but they're much more front-and-center here, which is distracting in spots.

Death of the Party

As someone who was a fan of Tommy Keene long before I had even heard of Guided by Voices or Robert Pollard, I was ecstatic to hear that one long-time favorite planned to collaborate with another. The result, Blues and Boogie Shoes, was better than I'd hoped, a near-perfect melding of Keene's pristine guitar pop and Pollard's off-kilter melodies and lyrics. It was what each needed. Keene's discs can occasionally suffer for lack of variety, while Pollard is at his best when he has a strong musical background against which to throw his ideas.

But many Pollard fans dismiss this album, and that puzzles me. The songs are strong, and it's one of Pollard's better vocal outings on non-GBV material. But reading through the comments on this blog, things are becoming clearer. Many times when I dismiss one of Pollard's noisier, more experimental tracks as indulgent or ill-formed, fans will spring to his defense. Where I much prefer poppy Pollard, some, it seems, embrace Uncle Bob for his nonconformist streak. That likely means something like Blues and Boogie Shoes sounds like nails on the chalkboard (the bizzaro world equivalent to Nightwalker for me).

"Death of the Party," then, is probably among that contingent's least favorite songs. It's a mid-tempo track with no twists, no turns and nothing out of the ordinary. Pollard throws a few lyrical curveballs that might make a Keene fan scratch his head, but otherwise it is completely straightforward. I love it because it has a strong melody and great singing from Pollard atop a typical chiming Keene guitar line. That's everything to me. To others, it's nothing.

You Must Engage

On the surface, "You Must Engage" sounds like another in the self-help rally song series that is Blues and Boogie Shoes. But, the chorus aside, it seems more like one of Robert Pollard's strange narratives where only he knows the story.

He begins with a declaration: "You must engage, go up the river, follow suit and to the cage of borrowed time." OK, I'm with you so far... kind of. But then this: "You must embrace, the stolen pieces of the cake, get out the meat." Yeah, right. And, "Lip them once, the homeless braves and fallen masters. Bunch of names -- the hallowed kind."

Okey dokey. Let's me see if I have this straight. We're going up the river to the cage of borrowed time where we'll embrace stolen pieces of cake and meat and then lip (kiss?) some homeless braves and fallen masters, all of them hallowed. Pay attention long enough and you'll start to feel like Frodo on some odd quest for a ring.

But the chorus feels like TV preacher mixed with self-help guru, as Pollard exhorts the listener: "You must not wait, you must engage, use all your rage." Now that's a rallying cry. Instead of turn on, tune in, drop out," we get something akin to "do it now, do it with purpose, do it with passion." Could an Obama commercial be far behind?

Where Others Fail

Perhaps the insistence of Tommy Keene's power pop backing tracks inspired Robert Pollard. How else to explain the near self-help feel of his lyrics? Here, as elsewhere, his verses offer a pat on the back and a chuck to the chin of the listener. "Pointing finger and driven nail, accept your fortune where others fail," he sings, sounding more like Dale Carnegie than that lovable curmudgeon, Uncle Bob.

As a long-time Keene fan, I love this album. Pollard's twisted melodies inject new life into Keene's somewhat formulaic brand of rock, while Keene's high-gloss hooks force Pollard to deliver high-quality hooks and forceful vocals in a way he hadn't much prior to this release. This track, however, is a bit disappointing, and blame can be laid at the feet of both "brothers."

Keene's backing track is an anachronistic slab of '80s guitar rock, with an opening riff that sounds lifted from some bland arena rock tune. It's a fine song, but not among his best. As for Pollard, he could have used that as a launch pad for some over-the-top performance, but he instead chooses to play it straight. His lyric and melody are good, but not enough to raise this beyond the middle of the pack on an album with far stronger material.

Pollard, it seems, failed to take his own advice, choosing to ignore the opportunity to find his fortune where Keene had failed.

The Naked Wall

The charm of Robert Pollard's collaborations with other artists is in the way he unearths melodic possibilities that might otherwise go unnoticed. Some collaborators offer sketches that force Pollard to create something from whole cloth, while others seem to nudge him in one direction only to see him chose another path that yields something equal, if not superior.

With Tommy Keene, Pollard encounters songs that are so complete that he often seems forced to choose the only melody left available. In these cases, his performance is what delivers the song. Such is the case with "The Naked Wall." The song could have been lifted directly from a Keene album; the only thing it lacks is the songwriter's vocal. The verses and chorus are clearly delineated, and the hooks are practically there. It's as if Keene had pulled a few paintings from a wall, leaving unfaded spots which Pollard need only find new, similarly sized art to cover.

A fitting analogy, that, for a song called "The Naked Wall." It's a driving rocker of the kind that Keene has populated many albums. While he would likely have turned it into a chronicle of longing, Pollard, um, offers this:

A child needs to grow, the heart needs to know about you.

The end is concealed, the song needs to build without you.

Words are sunk in a soft ground corrupted by heroes.

A man with the rope who blackmailed the wild horse.

It's never clear (to me, anyway) just what the naked wall is or why it is important to

"Bring you all together to make it right/ Sons of the bounty to break you, take you into the naked wall," but the way Pollard sings it, it sounds imperative... and damn catchy.

In a Popmatters interview given before the album's release, Keene explained that his latest album, Crashing the Ethers, might contain fewer rockers because some of them would up on Blues and Boogie Shoes. That included "The Naked Wall":

"There were a few rockers I wrote that you'll see wound up on the Pollard record. His title is 'The Naked Wall.'. I tell you, it sounds similar to (Keene's song) 'Nothing Can Change You.' When you hear that, imagine it with a different vocal melody and different lyrics, and that's the kind of thing that would have been the rocker kicking off (Crashing the Ethers)..."

Evil vs. Evil

It was no stretch to expect that Robert Pollard's collaboration with power-pop kingpin Tommy Keene would result in some of the Fading Captain's most conventional, most accessible music, and the resulting Blues and Boogie Shoes, credited to the Keene Brothers, delivered.

It's no slight to Keene to say that he doesn't seem capable of creating anything less than a fully formed song, so when his musical contributions to the disc sounded like typical Keene songs stripped of their vocals, it was no surprise. One can safely say that Pollard's melodies, and certainly his lyrics, veered from what one would expect from a Keene tune. The only surprise is that Keene let these tracks out of his hands. He hasn't exactly been prolific over the past decade, so handing over the music to what could have been a full, satisfying solo LP was a leap of faith.

The first track on the disc, however, is perfectly suited to the project and is no loss for Keene. at 50 seconds, "Evil vs. Evil" is too short to be anything other than a section of one of Keene's songs, but in Pollard's hands it becomes a mini epic with a monstrous hook. Few lyricists could cram what Pollard does into this space, essentially fusing chorus and verse together and leavening things with a tidy bridge.

What does it all mean? As usual, everything and nothing. The bridge includes the line "blaming it on the street team," which would seem to reference the music industry practice of getting fans to help it sell product by giving out swag in recompense for free promotional efforts, while the last chorus/verse, in its entirety -- "Zombie in tuxedo at the hall of voodoo watch with 'you do;' hero vs. mirror, digit vs. eyeball" -- has a lot of interesting imagery, but I'll be damned if I know what it means.

Poking around the web in search of tidbits about the collaboration, I came across an interview with Keene where he talked about this track. It seems he always intended it, and, if I read things right, all of the music here, for this project specifically: "I have to admit I sat down and tried to write a Pollard/GBV type of song that would come in at under a minute. I think I succeeded."