Butcher Man

I've never been a fan of Robert Pollard's various attempts to do voices. His singing voice is fine, thank you very much, and he doesn't need to do strange things with it to make a song compelling.

Case in point: "Butcher Man." The songs starts with a guitar strum that sounds like someone running a spoon down the back of a wicker chair. Pollard jumps in with a gruff voice -- perhaps his approximation of an old blues guy -- to sing, "Hey butcher man pays me, well what about it? I try not to hate it -- it hurts, and what if it did."

Typically odd lyrics from Pollard, made slightly more interesting thanks to the vocal delivery, but little more than a one-off in this presentation. As this short song progresses, however, Pollard starts to actually sing, and co-conspirator Todd Tobias fleshes out the music with drums and electric guitars. By the time they get to what counts as a bridge in such a short song, Pollard unearths an actual hook, then dives back into the verse. But with the more fully realized music and Pollard's singing, it feels like a real song. By the end, when Pollard sings, "I've got to mosey," I'm ready to say, "No, don't go yet," a complete flip from the shrug-inducing opening that has me reaching for the skip button until I remember the song buried at the end of the track.

Shadow Port

Is it ridiculous to say that Robert Pollard's lyrics for "Shadow Port" are among the best he's written, despite the fact that I have only a vague notion of what they mean? If so, consider me ridiculous, because these verses show a sophistication that is startling when compared to some of his earliest, bland "moon/June" love songs.

Here, the verses are inexplicably numbered, as if this was a poem set to music. Usually, that's a recipe for disaster, but in this case, it works well. The lyric seems to tell of a romance gone wrong, but rather than be explicit, Pollard here dances around it, brightening the corners in an effort to eventually illuminate the whole. "It's gone to hell," he begins, adding that you should "beware what you pray when it's all gone."

From the later verses, it seems that Pollard is the one that ended things by leaving. Perhaps this is a road song, another rock 'n' roll romance undone by touring. "I could nail the road for miles and we pull away," he sings at one point. But that's not to say he's callous about the split: "Surround me, oh, hold me. Don't leave me alone. Various breakdowns might take me all night."

In the end, his love is fleeting. It's not clear, but it seems as if he is warning the next one to come along. He might think that he was the one to leave, but that might not be the case. Delivering the strongest hook in the song, just 30 seconds before the song comes to a close he begins to chant, "She has wings, are you watching her?"

Come Here Beautiful

"Come Here Beautiful" is a spooky little song that feels like an impressionistic bit of flash fiction set to an acoustic guitar figure. Robert Pollard begins with an intriguing set-up: "A man said, 'Come here beautiful, I like your diamond and cold mounds of gold screaming kisses.'"

It could be the start of a joke were it not for the strange musical backing, as the guitar is joined by something that sounds like a musical saw while some light piano tinkling can be heard in the background. Pollard continues, "He made this comment to a woman of dreams, and yet she surely must be a queen."

The lyric grows predictably obtuse at this point, Pollard focusing his unique lens on the situation with a funny couplet that could stand on its own as a whimsical verse:

To perform
The mannequin must try very hard to move

He then introduces some conflict, with a fire in the kitchen that has people scrambling for the exits. The mannequin returns here, but cannot move. Instead of succumbing to the fire, however, it "began weeping snowflakes," an odd -- and by now safe to call Pollardian -- image.

Is the mannequin the beautiful one, the woman of dreams, the queen? I'd guess so, though Pollard never makes it clear. Yet the open-ended nature of the lyric isn't annoying for being incomplete, but rather all the more captivating for what it leaves to the imagination.

As a side note, the GBV Database reports that this song was at one time titled "Dream Lover" and was slated for the original version of Silverfish Trivia (which was also called in various incarnations, The Killers and Gratification to Concrete), the album slated for release on Merge as Pollard's follow up to Normal Happiness. He scrapped much of that, released it as an EP on his own and followed instead with the one-two punch of Standard Gargoyle Decisions and Coast to Coast Carpet of Love.

Accusations

"Accusations" shows the value of changing things up to keep a song interesting. In this case it's a radical shift in tempo. The song starts as a greasy little rocker that wouldn't stand out among the many other such Robert Pollard/Todd Tobias collaborations. After the more frantic first verse it slips into a plodding 4/4 beat over which Pollard sings "Dead I ain't little girl/ but last night I was alone."

Where the first verse seems to set up something that isn't delivered -- "they die around you and yet they come alive," Pollard sings -- the second is brief. He urges, "try it out, don't wait, feel it, you'll know." The tempo shifts again, dropping into that bluesy stomp, over which he sings the clever, "Making accusations, in the accustations."

As the song clatters to a close, Pollard fires one last salvo, singing, "A kiss will see it now, for generations my love, my heart."

All of this surely means something. Is it a kiss off to a lover? Political commentary (given a reference in he second chorus to "the backward nations"? Something else? Who's to say.

The Killers

"The Killers" offers an interesting look at the way Robert Pollard and Todd Tobias work together. It first surfaced on All That is Holy, the first album from Psycho and the Birds, a project that found Tobias augmenting some Pollard demos that featured his guitar and voice. The base of most of the songs is hard to hear, and the success or failure of the finished song, while based on whatever Tobias found as inspiration in Pollard's skeletal structures, largely rests on what Tobias was able to come up with. In this case, it's a song that doesn't necessarily support the front-cover notation -- "File Under: Hard-on Listener," a decidedly Pollardian double entendre that mixes juvenile humor with spot-on commentary.

While wildly prolific, Pollard also seems loathe to leave behind things that might be worth revisiting in higher-profile (and higher-fidelity) arenas (witness "Fair Touching," a song from the Fading Captain EP from Lexo and the Leapers that subsequently led off Guided by Voices last stab at the big time, Isolation Drills). Hence, "The Killers" was resurrected for another Pollard/Tobias project, the Pollard solo LP Standard Gargoyle Decisions. The song fits well as the lead-off for an album that was seen as the more rocking, experimental side of Pollard's then-current sound, the yin to Coast to Coast Carpet of Love's yang.

The song isn't much different here; it still begins with Tobias' inspired '80s guitar solo riff before dropping into a greasy groove over which Pollard sings with menace about "the killers" who are "coming to get you." It's a more muscular, hi-fi rendition, with Tobias able to create the song bed without worry of needing to keep a Pollard demo audible in the process. And Pollard, giving a full-throated performance as opposed to knocking out demo, projects much more, giving the song some heft that it understandably lacks in the earlier version. The latter take runs about 30 seconds longer, much of that given over to a noisy collage that is a fitting end for this angular little celebration of destruction.