Look is What You Have

"Look is What You Have" is a strange little song that seems perpetually stuck in second gear. It starts with a stuttering little rhythm that leaves my ear hoping that Robert Pollard will engage the clutch and shift the sucker into third. It's not unpleasant, at least at the start, but it feels like something that never reach its destination.

I suppose the problem -- for me, anyway -- is in the shift from verse to chorus. That jagged opening ought to swell into something magnificent, a tempo and tone version of the Pixies vaunted quiet-loud-quiet formula. Instead, Pollard seems to keep a tight hold on the reins (yes, I've regressed from car to horse metaphors), and that seems like a waste of the coiled tension of the song.

Don't get me wrong: this does shift into something more wide open, and the results are pleasing. They're also unsurprising and somewhat uninspiring, and even at this late date I tend to expect both from Pollard.

Dumb Lady

It's easy to go back again and again to Who references when writing about Robert Pollard, and I plan to do so again here. But it's not as clean here as it is elsewhere. Rather than call this a Pete Townshend homage, let's chalk it up as something John Entwistle might have brought to the proceedings -- a decent song that sounds like the band's work but which doesn't quite reach the heights of the output of the band's main songwriter.

"Dumb Lady" is a mid-tempo ballad of a type that Pollard doesn't often tackle. Like much of the material on Coast to Coast Carpet of Love, it deals, of course, with love. Here, Pollard is addressing the titular dumb lady who seems to have taken the protagonist's love for granted, content to bury her nose in a pile of cocaine rather than spend time cultivating the relationship.

Is she dumb because she makes this choice, or is she truly dense? Pollard seems to lean toward the latter in the first verse with the line "like fireflies and lightning bugs, they're the same thing, dumb lady."

He is much more direct as the song progresses, with lines like "you pushed me away - don't write me no more," and "Dread growing up?Do you believe me now? You lied about me around me, played me around."

Oh, and that reference to coke? It's rather explicit: "Cocaine crapshoots, need I say our love was tested?" he sings. Whatever the offense, be it stupidity or drug abuse, it was all too much: "And now is lost in folly, a love both shallow and proud."

He resigns himself to the loss as the song closes, urging the dumb lady to "be happy - get high," and urges her not to let him get the last word, to "bare the tale about me, I'm also blind," for he is as much to blame for thinking he could change her: "And with you it's always gonna rain, always feel the same."

He conveys all of this with a deceptively simple melody that sits perfectly atop Todd Tobias's strummed acoustic guitar. There's no grand hook here, just a sustained melancholy nicely echoed by the music.

The success of this and other tracks on this album induces more than melancholy, but rather a sense of frustration. Though it came out just two years ago, it is the last really accomplished sounding recording in Pollard's catalog. Whether that's simply happenstance or something that can be attributed to the fact that it was his last disc for a label not his own, I couldn't say. But quality control has become an issue -- and yes, I say that knowing all of the usually dismissed arguments about quality control as they related to an artist that releases seemingly everything he conceives -- and songs like "Dumb Lady" make that all too clear.

Life of a Wife

If Robert Pollard ever settles down and writes the true rock opera that is surely in him, "Life of a Wife" proves he has the knack for it. The song, with it's quietly strummed acoustic guitar and tinkling piano practically screams "I was influenced by Tommy!" That's no surprise, given Pollard's Who fandom.

Hearing lines like "I know it's a long way home," I assumed at first that the song was perhaps written for Pollard's new wife, Sarah Zade, acknowledging (warning?) the odd life of a musician and, by extension, that of his wife. Such a song would fit great with a rock opera about rock, which would seem right up Pollard's alley. But listening more carefully, I realize I was trying to shoehorn Pollard's song into my own idea, and that it probably isn't about that at all. One assumes Pollard wouldn't refer to his wife as "Mother of the wicked and the saved."

Rather, this feels like a song about a particular character, drawn from a book or a movie (or Pollard's fertile imagination). With its references to gardens and painting and past lives and "going down through the ages," it feels Victorian, the only anachronistic elements being a reference to phones and the line, "Noticing how East Coast traffic blows."

Musically, the song feels twee, like the quiet, more precious side of Pete Townshend's early work, or even something from the Left Banke. When the guitars kick in toward the end, the Left Banke comparisons go out the window, but Pollard cuts things short before an obvious spot for a solo break, keeping things to a tight two minutes. It's a good strategy, because when the song ends, I want nothing more than to cue it up again.