Their Biggest Win

"Their Biggest Win" closes Robert Pollard's Fiction Man with another bombastic rocker created by Todd Tobias. It's a giant, swinging track built around a skeletal lyric, Pollard's vocal swagger nicely echoed and supported by Tobias' ringing guitars, pounding drums and pulsing bass.

Pollard begins with something that reminds me of "Dayton Ohio 19-something and 5," alluding to another date, "1963 or 5," before dabbling in a bit of poetic ramble: "The heart, the glue, the backbone, rejoicing in the what is left, the energy theft."

The song truly kicks in then as Pollard dives into the chorus:

And we say nothing but when we want some
And we do nothing but when we get some

The second verse is just as cryptic as the first: "'The tree is dead,' they said, and they felt this
wild dog kill-lust never again, it was their biggest win." He then intones the chorus for the remainder of the song as Tobias bashes away.

Fiction Man isn't Pollard's best work, but it's among his most satisfying collaborations with Tobias because it's one of the few that feel as if Pollard was in the driver's seat.

Night of the Golden Underground

I am guilty of painting Robert Pollard's work with Todd Tobias with a broad brush. There is a certain sound the pair have settled into, at least on albums under Pollard's name, and it is somewhat abrasive and rarely what I would call delicate or sweet.

That's unfair, of course, and "Night of the Golden Underground" is proof positive. It's as gentle and light a song as Pollard has done, but it is underheard -- at least in my household -- because it is buried toward the tail end of an album that I go to when I want to hear some great Who-esque rockers. When I do rediscover it, usually thanks to a shuffle setting on the iPod, I'm always amazed that such a song appears so late in Pollard's career, and on a disc helmed by Tobias.

It's a fairly simple, quiet song with a great melody. Pollard sings over a strummed acoustic guitar which is itself overlaid with some gentle plucked notes on a second guitar. Drums come along about midway to drive things, ever so subtly. If Pollard was singing about anything in particular, this thing would have senior prom slow dance written all over it.

It's Only Natural

Fiction Man is currently my favorite Fading Captain Series release. That status waxes and wanes depending on what I'm listening to at the moment, but I think it's safe to say the album is clearly among the best of that series and the best of Robert Pollard's official solo albums. Songs like "It's Only Natural" are the reason.

The disc, and songs like this in particular, are satisfying because Pollard fully indulges his love of the Who with songs that are worthy of the riffage and bombast. "It's Only Natural" is as swaggering lyrically as it is musically, starting off with the proclamation that "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do," before launching into one of his most sexual songs. He sings about stroking men in higher positions, appetites to roam "like a narcoleptic truck" and checking out the "camel-toe web site," conjuring odd images that are more straightforward than his usual allusions to insects, body parts and aircraft. He closes with the great line, "I can take a garden and turn it into a grave."

All throughout, collaborator Todd Tobias creates a near-cacophony of power chords and crashing drums, seemingly indulging his own Pete Townshend and Keith Moon.

Paradise Style

Robert Pollard is an avowed fan of the Who's bombastic magnificence, and in its most majestic moments, his music scales similarly lofty heights. "Paradise Style" seems like the result of an exercise: Record a song that sounds like a forgotten track from Odds and Sods. Done! It's essentially a monstrous guitar riff atop a constantly rolling drum fill. Oh, and Pollard sings, of course. But the lyrics definitely sound like one of his impressionistic poems shoehorned meter-wise into this short little tune. The Guided by Voices Database would seem to confirm this, offering that the song titles on Fiction Man mostly stemmed from the poems in Pollard's self-published journal, EAT. If this whole thing took more than 30 minutes from idea to completed take I'd be disappointed. Let's just say it sounds better than it is. Translation: listen once quickly and move on.