The Vault of Moons

After an incongruous, robotic voice asks, "Is anybody out there?" sounding like a bad FM radio bumper from the '80s, this song gets down to business as a sort of catalog of Pollardiana. There's the bug reference (The opening line about "the caterpillar's destiny"), a mention of boxing (prizefighter), the title of another song in the lyric ("All Men Are Freezing") and a reference to the song as a song ("This is called 'The Vault of Moons'.")

Beyond that, the song is fairly unremarkable. Pollard sings over a strummed acoustic guitar for much of it, adding some trippy electric guitar solos throughout. In the second verse, his voice is compressed considerably, and a crowd is dubbed in as he sings/speaks the line about the title of the song. After that, a second guitar line comes in that starts to make things interesting, but it doesn't last long.

First Spill is Free

I usually associate The Takeovers with raunchy garage rock, but Chris Slusarenko has more up his sleeve than distorted power chords and ramshackle beats. "First Spill is Free" is built on a pleasant acoustic guitar figure, and Pollard creates a nice vocal melody that feels like the exact right line for the song. On past collaborations, this is the kind of song that Pollard would let stand as an instrumental, but he must have heard something he liked here and decided to give it a shot.

That's to his credit. It's a nice early respite from the rock of album opener "Insane/Cool It" (ignoring, for the moment, the spoken word "Do You Get Your Wish?"

He opens with an interesting progression:

How much stronger can you be?
How much wronger can you be?
How much dumber can you be?
Not much dumber than me.

Then he gets to what seems like the root of the song's title, which puts me in mind of the aisles of a grocery store:

We'll be stocking up on the jack and shine, on the shopping spree.
They'll be laying out, we'll go mopping it up, first spill is free,
Free on me.

Is Pollard the clean-up boy at the local Kroger grocery store? He's OK with a customer spilling something, the first time, anyway.

He then recites a litany of acronyms: "I want ACT... IUV... LUC... FRE" Beyond the ACT test to get into college, I have no idea what these could possibly mean, if anything (keeping in mind, of course, that T, V, C and E all rhyme, which may be enough).

He then seems to address a lover, perhaps his younger wife, with a profession of his virility:

When I get old to you, I've got to show you what I can do.
Baby my sign is the form of the wolf, and baby my blood is the only way.

That's a lot of ground to cover in less than two minutes, so I usually turn off the part of my brain that follows lyrics and just luxuriate in the melody and Slusarenko's guitar. Most of the time, that's enough.

First of an Early Go-Getter

Lest anyone think Doug Gillard is only good for some monster guitar riffs and intricate solos, he drops a spooky synth- and piano-driven tune on us thanks to his collaboration with Robert Pollard as the Lifeguards.

"First of an Early Go-Getter" sounds as first like it will be an instrumental. Pollard likes to give his collaborators one instrumental track per album (yes, I'll characterize this as largess rather than sloth), but this isn't that ("Sea of Dead" gets the honor here). Instead, Gillard just takes a mighty long time to set the mood before giving Pollard his aural "here's where you come in" cue.

When he does, adding drums, bass and guitar, the song takes on a ponderous yet insistent tone that Pollard tackles with bravado undercut by some anxiety. I only gather that from his performance; the lyrics are inscrutable as always. Though not, of course, without their charms. Lines like "wistful oboe double, Klondike gut sticker" and "down where and eye stops on a dolphin fairy, the world singing war & roses and we raise our stumps in from the harvest" are puzzling yet oddly compelling (or perhaps oddly compelling because they're so puzzling).

Either way, the song is key evidence in the argument that Pollard really ought to give Gillard a call. His guitar might be the single most identifiable part of the latter-day GBV sound, but it's clear from this that he brought a lot more to the table.

Look at Your Life

Imagine this: Robert Pollard is in Las Vegas performing at a casino. He's wearing some sort of monochrome pant suit. He's holding one of those long, slim microphones in one hand, perhaps a scarf in the other. A guitar begins to play quietly, joined by a light tap on a snare drum. Then he begins to sing:

"Send pictures of the slides in your life, yeah, look at your life."

The image doesn't hold for long, as the all-star garage band Pollard assembled to be his Moping Swans quickly shifts the dynamic toward "stun" and drives "Look at Your Life" into overdrive, but for a few moments, the song and Pollard's breezy delivery always conjures that scene.

Despite the propulsion provided by Greg Demos (bass), Jim MacPherson (drums) and Tony Conley (ex-Anacrusis on guitar), the lyrics, and Pollard's reading of them, still have a wistful feel. If anything, they're a bit incongruous, but Pollard's passionate performance makes it work. Still, I'd love to hear a demo, for this song would work well as lighter singer-songwriter fare. Lines like "Where many a good friend dies away, maybe someday they'll stay" begs for a more sensitive presentation.

Do Something Real

A song like "Do Something Real" points out two things: 1) If Robert Pollard and Co. had had the patience and resolve to see their best songs through to their best result, the band's already strong albums of the Doug Gillard era would have been that much stronger, and 2) Pollard would do well to mix up his collaborators a bit.

On the first point, "Do Something Real" is a fantastic song essentially issued in demo form. It's the fruit of one of Pollard's many collaborative albums. Usually that involves a musician creating instrumental songbeds over which Pollard sings a lyric and melody of his own creation. Here with Guided by Voices guitarist Doug Gillard, the two truly collaborate. It's essentially a Pollard solo album with Gillard playing all of the instruments. Until looking at the songwriting credits just now, I always assumed that Gillard wrote all the music. Pollard wrote nearly all of the songs on Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, however, so there's no reason the strongest tracks couldn't have made their way to a GBV record. As someone who buys everything he releases, I'm glad he is willing to salt his offbeat solo albums with choice cuts, but it's certainly not in his best interest.

On the second point, this album in execution is much like his latter day solo albums, exchanging Gillard for current right-hand man Todd Tobias. I've express my love-hate relationship with Tobias' creations elsewhere, but suffice to say that this song in his hands would have been very different. It would have been more pummelling, more obvious and would lack Gillard's killer guitar solo. The obvious move there would be some sort of wailing wankery, but Gillard instead dials it back for a solo that alternates crisp acoustic picking with George Harrisonesque slide. While I wish the song had the power of well-produced GBV behind it, I'm glad that Gillard was given a crack at it rather than Tobias, and it makes me long for another Pollard/Gillard collaboration.

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.

You've Taken Me In

When you record and release more than 1,000 songs, it's reasonable to expect that you'll inhabit more than a few different persona. It only makes sense; who wants to hear 1,000 variations on the same voice, the same point of view? In the case of Robert Pollard, that means a spectrum of presentations. Among them are s the gruff old man of "Butcherman," the earnest pop singer of "Hold on Hope" and the swaggering rock god of, well, nearly everything else. "You've Taken Me In" falls in the middle category.

This bonus track on the Crickets collection that gathers (most) of the best of the Fading Captain series is an understated acoustic gem. Like most Pollard bonus tracks, it began life as part of a project that didn't pan out, in this case the Killers album that was a precursor to the Silverfish Trivia EP. This was a prolific period for Pollard (then again, have there been many non-prolific periods?). Songs from that project landed on Silverfish Trivia, Standard Gargoyle Decisions and Coast to Coast Carpet of Love, among others. You can always argue Pollard's decisions with regard to what goes where, and a case could be made that a single stronger album could have been culled from these releases. That's a quixotic quest that isn't worth more than chatroom fodder, but suffice to say that "You've Taken Me In" would appear on any such collection.

The song, credited to "Little Bobby Pop" (a great name for that incarnation of Mr. Pollard's personality, that), is built on a quiet acoustic guitar figure over which Pollard sings in a tone seemingly designed to assure a lover that he is absolutely harmless. The menace and snarl he can call up in a heartbeat is nowhere to be found. It's a sweetly sung ballad that glides in and out in a scant two minutes; a true bonus.

It Is Divine

On the surface, "It Is Divine" seems like Robert Pollard's paean to summers of his youth. "The colorful summer, I still remember the smell of the chlorine, the diving hairline," he sings. Ah yes, summer. The smell of chlorine and the... um... diving hairline? Lost me there, Bob.

That, it seems, is his point. Inspired by one of Mac McCaughan's most straightforward, pretty instrumentals, Pollard eagerly embraces the feeling of sweet melancholy. But with each verse, he offers a twist. Thus the diving hairline. That is followed by the second verse, where the study of plants and hiking of trails morphs into strange echoes, lights and advice from cows. The third verse is just as strange, though more consistently. One can imagine polishing the pearl and opening the tomb, I suppose, but pissing on the hot street like transistor sunman? I cringe at the thought of watching that slide show in the Pollard's basement the subsequent winter.

With each verse, Pollard gets to the point: "It is divine my child, and it only lasts a second." No matter how strange your summer -- Bob, I'm looking at you -- it needs to be cherished, for it is truly divine, and, as any of us for whom childhood summers are an ever-receding memory in the rear view can attest, it does seem to last no more than a second.

Flings of the Waistcoat Crowd

If there is one thing I've learned from writing about all of these Robert Pollard compositions over the past several months, it is that the Guided by Voices honcho has many, many quiet, tender tunes. I've long been a fan of his great Who-like rock tunes, fantastic, soaring anthems driven by power chords and crashing drums. But someone with the inclination could put together a pretty amazing little singer-songwriter album if they cherrypicked all of the songs like "Flings of the Waistcoat Crowd" from Pollard's catalog.

I mean, this thing is positively Crosby, Stills & Nash caliber. Pollard, dueting with himself, sings over some nice finger-picked guitar while a lone, barely noticed keyboard note fills in some of the aural background.

Lyrically, this feels like a Revolutionary War tale, something no doubt conjured by the title:

Over the big river
Scum of us rinsed by a hard rain
The tar, the teeth & the gear

Yet no trail
All around the camp
And that is our game
To brag and complain
To guess who goes next
To tally the scars
Learn every weakness

The song is bookended by near parallel lines that foretell some degradation in the situation of the person from whose viewpoint Pollard sings, starting with "Great days are becoming" and ending with the slightly less hopeful "Great days will be coming."

Regardless, it's a beautiful little song and another example that Pollard, despite the prominence of big, loud songs in his repertoire -- and the drunken party that always accompanies their performance -- he's equally talented at pinning his heart to his sleeve and singing sweetly.

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.

I'm Dirty

Puzzle pieces can click into place in the strangest places. While listening to Crickets during a long drive this weekend, "I'm Dirty" from the Howling Wolf Orchestra EP Speedtraps for the Bee Kingdom came on. As the song began, I remarked how much the song sounded like vintage Clean with it's clean, quickly strummed guitar and simple beat. It's no stretch, as Robert Pollard is clearly a fan, having covered the band's "Draw(in)g to a (W)hole" with GBV for a tribute a decade ago. Then it hit me: The title "I'm Dirty" is probably a not-so-thinly veiled admission that he was ripping off/paying tribute to the Clean. The lyrics, while vague as usual, do allude to things that would make one declare that he is, in fact, dirty, but I can't help but think the title is Pollard's winking admission that he had written a song that wouldn't sound out of place on the awesome Vehicle LP. The Clean themselves were not above playing with their own name. After they split for the first time in the early 1980s, the core duo of brothers David and Hamish Kilgour continued on as the Great Unwashed. A bit more clever than simply saying "dirty," but for Pollard's song it works perfectly.

Dolphins of Color

I'm still coming around on the Circus Devils music made by Robert Pollard and Todd Tobias. I appreciate that their collaborations have yielded music that is different from everything else in Pollard's catalog -- few CD songs could pass for those of Guided by Voices, for example -- and that Tobias has pushed Pollard's solo material in interesting directions. Those directions haven't always been the ones I would choose to follow, yet, but with "Dolphins of Color" they have created a song that is near perfect.

With the Circus Devils projects Tobias (and on some, his brother, Tim) creates the instrumentation for a song, and then has Pollard sing over it. This process, with Tobias and others, has been hit or miss. Here, it's a hit. Over Tobias's pump organ and clanking percussion (rattling chains and handclaps, perhaps?), Pollard offers one of his most impassioned vocals, sounding not unlike Peter Gabriel, oddly enough. It's the perfect marriage of music and voice; you wouldn't want anything else from Tobias, and Pollard, while dominating things, leaves enough space so that the backing track can breathe.

It would seem like a perfect song for live performance, but the song, found on the live MOON and as the B-side of the "Love is Stronger Than Witchcraft" single, falls flat here. It seems to require the intimacy of Tobias's workshop creation and Pollard's tight vocals. With drums and a drunken, looser Pollard, it just doesn't work.

Pollard obviously values the song, using it for that solo B-side and including it as one of few Circus Devils tracks on the Crickets collection.

Beaten by the Target

"Beaten by the Target" seems to be another of Robert Pollard's songs about his failed stab at the big time with Guided by Voices. "From the long shots and commands, I got beaten by the target," he sings, admitting that rather than conquer the mainstream, the mainstream conquered him. But by the end of the song, as he did on the similarly themed "Second Spurt of Growth" from Half Smiles of the Decomposed, he offers a rallying cry, a sign that he's far from done: "Almost beaten by the target," he sings.

It's interesting that he does so as part of a one-off group, the Moping Swans. The group, with former GBVers Jim Macpherson and Greg Demos on drums and bass, respectively, could pass for an abbreviated version of his former band. Only the presence of guitarist Tony Conley, who played with Pollard two decades prior in their metal band, Anacrusis, marks this as slightly different from his earliest solo output that often paired him with players from the GBV family tree. All of this seems to be his way of saying to the masses, "I'll release even more music, not less, and it'll be as good as anything I offered up to you ingrates."

The EP offers just six songs, but it is one of the strongest entries in Pollard's Fading Captain Series. The songs are simple, none more than this opener, which feels like a quickly composed three-chord rocker. Despite the sunny nature of the tune, there is some bitterness here. Lines like "Hurry hop, where do I smile?" and, most cleverly, "To limp across your highway for love with a white flag in my hand," indicate that while Pollard saw his brush with the big time as a "what don't kill you makes you stronger" experience -- at one point he proclaims himself "almost better for the bargain" -- he does view it with a jaundiced eye. Lucky for us, he conveys his sentiments with a strong melody and a backbeat.

Fairly Blacking Out

I always considered Chris Slusarenko the luckiest guy in the world. Here he was, the proprietor of the micro-indie Off Records, a label that issued the one-off oddity Soundtrack for the Tropic of Nipples that paired Robert Pollard with rock writer Richard Meltzer. Then suddenly, he's the bass player in Guided by Voices! Of course, nothing is that simple. Slusarenko led the Sub Pop band Sprinkler, and has many other music world connections. What at the time seemed like Pollard grabbing a friend and making him his bass player now seems like a prudent move to add another talented musician to his arsenal.

Tracks like "Fairly Blacking Out" are the proof. The song, found on the first Takeovers disc Turn to Red, is another of Pollard's collaborations wherein someone records the song bed and then sends the tape to Bob for vocals to be added. Slusarenko's two Takeovers discs are the most stripped-down of all these collaborations, but in some ways that makes them among the most satisfying. Instead of relying on the other musician's chops to carry the song, here Pollard is forced to do more heavy lifting. With "Fairly Blacking Out," Bob takes a fairly simple garage-influenced riff and elevates it into a song that stands among the best of his Fading Captain years (something confirmed by its inclusion on the Crickets collection).

This is fairly straight-forward riff rock, but listening to it on headphones for the first time reveals some interesting noises and keyboards in the background. Pollard seems to be trying to say something in the verses, starting with, "She said that’s a cute cat, yeah, weather really dumped on us last year," but the chorus, which simply repeats the title along with the admonitions that "you know where we got it" and "you can't beat the system," seem hastily composed.

One funny spoken line seems incongruous, but maybe I'm missing something: "Your parents spent a shitload of money on you so you can end every statement of your slowly delivered speech with your inflection, question, you know?"

Then there's that great psych guitar (or is that a keyboard?) solo toward the end, something that probably should have been used more prominently through out. All of it comes together to create a song that fits as well in Pollard's discography as it would on a Nuggets compilation, and one that assures that Slusarenko is considered to be more than just the lucky bass player.