Glorified Ushers

So, Robert Pollard sends off a pretty basic song recording to Todd Tobias, and Tobias fleshes out this boombox track that is lacking in anything other than guitar and vocals. Sometimes he overwhelms things, sometimes he lets more of Pollard seep through. And sometimes, as on "Glorified Ushers," he makes it into something that makes me practically ache at the thought of what these two could do if Pollard got up off his ass and put more work into it.

That's not the point of Psycho and the Birds, of course. Pollard is the Psycho, the guy compulsively recording songs in his basement, too obsessed with the notion of creation to be bothered with perfecting and polishing. Tobias is the Birds, a one-man approximation of a flock flitting about energetically. Here, his reach and grasp are synced, and he takes a decent Pollard idea and spins it into a pretty decent pop song.

If everything Pollard contributed to this track was stripped away, and he were to return to the studio to lay down a new, intelligible vocal and some better rhythm guitar parts, the song would be worthy of inclusion on one of his solo records, not relegated to this side project. At one time, Pollard's output was so impressive (both from a quality and quantity standpoint) that he could get away with detours like this. Today, the quality has dipped while the quantity has remained constant. That makes the tossed-off use of what became a good song both disappointing and suspect.

Organic Comes On

Robert Pollard has few straight-forward songs. Even his simplest-sounding tunes have twists and turns that make them interesting. It's telling that he relegates one of his most direct songs -- musically speaking, that is -- to a side project that almost ensures it will be little heard and, for those who do hear it, near inscrutable.

Here, Pollard strums his way through a song that wouldn't be out of place at a late-70s Laurel Canyon songwriter's night. Todd Tobias' contributions here are fairly low key, nudging Pollard's song in the right direction rather than dominating it as he must on some of the more slight tracks on this EP.

The lyrics are almost completely indecipherable, but that's no real concern this time. They carry the melody, which in this case is enough. The Psycho and the Birds project is frustrating, because one wishes Pollard would take the time to use these recordings as demos rather than the base for final recordings. But he's too busy to do so (unless the finished product is so catchy, as with "The Killers" from All That is Holy, which he recut for Standard Gargoyle Decisions), so we're left with this.