You Learn Something Old Every Day

"You Learn Something Old Every Day" is one in a long line of lead-off tracks that in no way prepare the listener for the music that will follow. The song is as musically minimal as they come, built on the sound of a drumstick bounced on a snare drum with heavy echo. As this fades in, Pollard then sings the lyric:

Exposure is knowledge
We have pictures to prove it
Perpetual crisis
Manifested modern and updated
Is it not good?
Cans of worms worth purchasing?
Open them up
And discover what?

It's an existential little ditty, to be sure, something that would work better as a "poem" in one of Pollard's Eat publications. When he's done, the drum is again the only sound, its diminishing reverberations creating a sort of low rumbling his beneath it all.

As written about in previous posts, Pollard clearly likes the title of this song. Though it doesn't appear in the lyric here, it does in two other songs: "7 Strokes to Heaven's Edge" on the Hardcore UFOs boxed set and in "The Great Blake Street Canoe Race" on Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia.

The music that follows on the rest of this EP is fairly straight-forward Pollard rock, with his brother, Jim, and latter-day Guided by Voices guitarist Nate Farley accompanying him. Get past this short, not terribly compelling track, and you'll find one of the better Fading Captain releases.

Is It Mostly? (It Is Mostly)

There are few instrumentals in the Guided by Voices catalog, and rightly so. The band is centered on the vocal melodies of Robert Pollard. Everything else aside, that is the hook. So a track like "Is It Mostly? (It Is Mostly)" is rightly relegated to a side project. It would be one thing if it was any good. Thing is, in keeping with the title, it is mostly bad, little more than some fumbling piano and an the echo-heavy beating of a snare drum. If this was the result of anything more than studio doodling while Pollard wrote another dozen songs that did have hooks, he should be ashamed. Come to think of it, wasting a track on a disc on this is fairly shameful in and of itself. Then again, that's Pollard's ethic, so it's unfair to criticize it.

Where is Out There?

Speedtraps for the Bee Kingdom is an odd little record, even for Robert Pollard's catalog. It was released in the waning days of 2000, a year that saw no official Guided by Voices album, but which did see release of the sprawling, awe-inspiring first Suitcase boxed set. Coming just two months after that 100-song set hit the doorstep, it was easy to ignore this modest collection from something dubbed the Howling Wolf Orchestra. It was, like Lexo and the Leapers that came before it and the Soft Rock Renegades that followed, a one-off group assembled from among Pollard's stable to record some stray tracks.

This time out Pollard grabbed Nate Farley, the former guitar tech turned recent band addition, and brother Jim Pollard, to flesh out his songs. In the case of "Where is Out There?" however, it doesn't seem as if Farley or Jim took part. The song is entirely built on an acoustic guitar and Pollard's multi-tracked, heavily echoey and processed vocals. It's a pretty song made slightly more interesting by the vocal effects. Lyrically, it's another of Pollard's songs that likely started life as a poetry fragment:

Ego wheels in motion
Where is out there?
It belongs to nocturnal boyhood
Figureless fathers in their complete nonexample
And fresh pleasures elsewhere - No!
She wants concrete language
Bad lungs and an ape that changes colors.

Some interesting images there, but not much that coheres. As with many of Pollard's side projects, however, this one isn't about getting a message across or telling a story.

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.