Guided by Voices/New Radiant Storm King
“The Opposing Engineer (Sleeps Alone)” b/w “I Am a Scientist”
1995, Chunk Records
In the vast Sargasso Sea that is Robert Pollard’s body of work, there are remarkably few cover songs. My guess is that there are less than ten, but I don’t have an exact count. I could spend a few minutes researching the matter, but I’m not going to do that because these reviews are already geeky ENOUGH.
This 7″ offers one of those rare specimens. It’s one of those cute split-singles that indie rock bands sometimes do where they cover each other’s songs. You know the drill.
Gonna be honest, I don’t know much about New Radiant Storm King except that they were a band from Massachusetts who lasted about twenty years. Maybe I should investigate them further because their “The Opposing Engineer (Sleeps Alone)” is a great fucking song. It’s a mean, seething take on love gone wrong. Thanks to Youtube, I’ve heard their original version and it’s good, but it does that indie rock thing in which the singer almost sounds like a ghost who’s haunting the song, rather than driving it. The guitar noise matters just as much if not more.
By contrast, while Guided by Voices stick close to the original arrangement, Robert Pollard sings this like it’s a 60s garage rock record, something from Pebbles vol. 96. His voice is mixed upfront and loud in this toasty warm piece of lo-fi. Pollard digs into the song’s anger, seemingly without even trying very hard. He sounds like he’s merely sitting in the same basement where he made Alien Lanes and belting this out into the same tape recorder. And it’s huge. He owns it.
Robert Pollard is a great singer. No, he doesn’t do vocal acrobatics or other stupid shit like that, but he always sounds like himself. His voice isn’t grating or difficult. It’s whiskey-and-cigarettes raspy, but comfortable. He breathes naturally. He sounds like a person. Pollard merely delivers the songs. His British inflections come off as unconscious. It reflects the music that he listens to most. It’s how he learned how to sing, simple as that. The cover songs really bring this out. I love hearing him sing covers.
On the flip side, New Radiant Storm King carry GBV’s “I Am a Scientist” just fine and they, likewise, stick to the original arrangement (aside from a nod to “Non-Absorbing” from Vampire on Titus). It ain’t half-bad, but “I Am a Scientist” is pretty much the THEME SONG of Guided by Voices. Nobody on Earth is ever gonna sing “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees / And people say we monkey around” like Micky Dolenz and nobody on Earth is ever going to sing “I am a scientist / I seek to understand me” like Robert Pollard.
That’s just a flat fact, folks.