Headhunter Who Blocks the Sky

The music of Circus Devils is challenging at times, but it's often worth the effort because that same challenge is issued to Robert Pollard. Whenever you think he's phoning it in with a string of two-minute pop ditties, just slid a Circus Devils disc into the player and watch Uncle Bob squirm.

Or, in the case of a track like, "Headhunter Who Blocks the Sky," watch him seamlessly drop himself into the tune. Todd Tobias creates a soundtrack-worthy swirl of sound here, with pounding drums and keening keyboards that sound like elkhorns being blown on distant mountaintops.

Pollard gets into the scene here with a short but powerful lyric that helps to conjure such a setting:

The sun is shining on his path
when he comes to make you talk
he’ll be wearing red pants
hunting and eating.

There is promise there that isn't fulfilled; it's a short track, and rather than jam it full of lyrics to tell some sort of tale, Pollard opts for minimalism, offering only one more short verse:

The white circle of summer
false teeth in his breath pack
young and exotic
where land disappears...

It's enough, however. Tobias is the star here; Pollard is almost another instrument (albeit the one that makes all of us Pollard/GBV obsessives pony up $15 for a CD of music we might not otherwise seek out.

Look Between What's Goin' On

Now this is more like it. I have dipped a toe into the Circus Devils catalog a few times here, and each time it seems my blanket assumptions about the project -- they can be summed up as "loud, rarely tuneful noise" -- are to be challenged. There are melodies and hooks here, you just need to wade through some rather tuneless tracks to find them.

Ah, here we go, one of those bits of chaff that cloak the wheat. "Look Between What's Goin' On" isn't painful, necessarily, but it's certainly a challenging listen. While Todd Tobias' backing track clatters, rattles and wheezes, Robert Pollard sings,

Same cartoon all along
Look between what’s goin’ on
Know your rights
More your wrongs
Look between what’s goin’ on

If one were to assume the lyrics were specifically crafted to accompany this music (as opposed to simply being notebook scraps that fit), then perhaps Pollard is commenting on the fact that the machine of life just keeps chugging along. Tobias' factory-approximating track symbolizes industry, or just the mechanization of life itself, and Pollard is the guy pushing broom across the floor, assuring all he passes that it's the same old cartoon, but if you look between what's going on, you just might figure it out... or at least figure out that there's nothing you can do but accept it.

More hands to kill with
More hearts to hate with
More mouths to spit with
And feed you...

He sings (or rather, intones) as he shuffles past before a wheezing harmonica comes in for the last few seconds of the song. Perhaps that's the 5 o'clock whistle. It's quitting time.

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.