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.

Shame Me No Further

It is inevitable that, with 1,200 songs and counting to his name, Robert Pollard would pen a song that sounds like that of another artist. Then again, if a dozen people were asked to find similarities between "Shame Me No Further" and the Rolling Stones' "I Wanna Be Your Man," I wouldn't be surprised if the majority were unable to do so.

I've long had an itch every time I spun Lightninghead to Coffee Pot, tripping on "Shame Me No Further." Just this morning, listening to the disc again, I suddenly had the lyrics to the Stones' song pop fully formed into my head. I tracked down this on YouTube for confirmation. It's far from an exact match, but it's close, and Brian Jones' guitar solo sounds like a near note-for-note template for Tony Conley's on this track.

All of that aside -- Pollard's likely unintentional lifting can be forgiven, because if you're going to steal, at least steal from the best -- the song is another strong one on this straightforward EP. it has great hooks beyond those shared with the Stones song, and certainly a more jagged, insistence. The lyrics, as usual, contain interesting images that don't seem to cohere to tell any sort of story, but they do fit well with the urgency of the music.

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.