Robert Pollard
Waved Out
1998, Matador Records
In 1998, Robert Pollard was 40 years old and his plan for Guided by Voices was that he was gonna at least take a stab at selling out Budokan while he was still spry. It was cool with me. I was rooting for him. A slick, Ric Ocasek-produced GBV album was something that I was curious to hear.
One might have wondered though if maybe we were losing the fucked-up psychedelic pop genius that we’d been following. Part of GBV’s character was a curious freedom on record. Noise. Accidents that sounded cool. Albums in which weird, misfit songs found a comfortable home next to killer hooks. A very uncommercial sort of beauty. It wasn’t mere indie/lo-fi snobbery. Robert Pollard found his voice (and his audience) embracing rough edges and home recording. It was how his songs sounded good. It was why he didn’t sign with Warner Brothers in 1994 and remake Alien Lanes for radio like the suits wanted.
How was any of Ocasek’s studio magic gonna compete with that?
If you were paying attention though, you didn’t worry about that much. Robert Pollard is a song machine. His does his job each day and new songs are not a problem. He was still writing little oddballs and making low-budget recordings. Pollard had stacks of fresh goodness that didn’t fit on Guided by Voices albums anymore. Great songs, haunting songs, shadowy moods, alien vibes and psychedelic nutcase stuff that the deep-diggers want to hear.
Sounds like a great idea for a solo album, to me.
Sounds like Waved Out.
Robert Pollard’s second solo LP (the first was Not in My Airforce) is a dark one. It’s also a strange one and a funny one all at the same time. It mourns, rages, wrings its hands and ends on a drone. It came out in June, but it sounds like one bitter Ohio winter. Its sounds like a frontman without a band and with a marriage that teetered on the edge still doing his thing despite everything. He’s not playing music business games. He’s an artist unloading his soul into the nearest mic and tape machine.
It’s hopeful, in a curious way.
Pollard’s gift for melody is all over it. It’s in the rockers, the ballads and the crazy shit. With John Shough’s light production hand and Pollard’s own guitar work dominating, these tracks are all naked melody. There are some real beauties here and something in its brevity (fifteen songs in just under thirty-five minutes) feels triumphant. Robert Pollard doesn’t wallow. His songs are about exorcising the demons, not being stuck with them. Even if the lyrics don’t find a way out, the music does.
And some demons can be chased out in less than two minutes, Pollard tells us.
Opening track “Make Use” sounds at least partly like his comment on last year’s Cobra Verde debacle via beautifully ascending art-rock. It’s about regret (“such shots in the dark, I should not risk”), but it’s also about moving on. When Pollard sings “Be humble to our works/ We have suffered the change again”, he’s does so like it’s a simple matter of fact. Guided by Voices have changed over and over again since the beginning. Pollard’s used to it. If you’re going to follow his music, you will need to get used to it, as well. The killer chorus here is a great argument for why it’s worth it.
Pollard often sequences a “weird” song in at track 2. It lets you know right away that anything can happen on this record and the oddly spooky “Vibrations in the Woods” is a nice example. Pollard plays everything on it himself, from guitar to drums to whatever that weird percussive sound is in the chorus and coda. The lyrics are vague and elemental enough that it could be about anything, but I think it’s about bird migration.
Third song “Just Say the Word”, and another Pollard one-man-band moment, is a tight fist of understated tension. I have no idea what it’s about, but it FEELS like something that came out after an argument with the wife, one of those fights in which nobody wins (“Recreate no perfect score”). Both sides are exhausted. There’s nowhere else to go. “Just say the word”? Maybe the “word” is “divorce”. Just throwin’ that out there.
After some dark shit like that, I, personally, could use a pop song–and here it comes… Track four. A killer.
I’m talkin’ “Subspace Biographies”. One of Pollard’s monster classics. To this day, it’s maybe the leanest summary of Pollard and what he does. Along with being a real thunderbolt of an anthem, it’s also a definitive mission statement song. “I do my job each day/ Empties crushed and fired away.” It’s about the artist’s life. “There is nothing worse th’n an undetermined person” (the apostrophe in “th’n” is straight from the lyric sheet) is another key line. If he was in a dark place on the previous song, here he’s got his shiniest space helmet on, his jetpack is in perfect working order and he’s all confidence.
After that, we get the lo-fi cool down with “Caught Waves Again”, though it’s another great song, too. Doug Gillard provides the simple backing music. It’s one acoustic guitar just strolling down the street. Anything could be on its mind. On top of it, Pollard throws a surreal little story. His narrator talks like a David Lynch character. He speaks in vaguely connected imagery we’re not sure what it all means, though the character in the song seems to understand exactly what he’s saying. He’s started “catching waves again” and twenty-one years later I still don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Title track “Waved Out” brings the herk and jerk and Wire’s frosty post-punk influence. I have a live version on a CD-R somewhere on the shelf in which Pollard explains on stage that it’s a “fuck work” song. It’s about those periods when you just don’t want to do ANYTHING. It’s about the apathy and depression that can result when one zeroes in on life’s meaninglessness. It’s not a downer song, though. It rocks! It’s also a whole one minute and fourteen seconds long, though it’s packed with words.
Again, Pollard doesn’t wallow. He spits out the poison and then moves on.
In this case, he moves on to “Whiskey Ships”, his darkest song about addiction since Same Place the Fly Got Smashed.
“Wrinkled Ghost”, recorded by Tobin Sprout (I’d know that drum machine anywhere), brings some needed levity afterward, but I don’t know. The lyrics are baffling. It’s a rollercoaster of uncertainty and defiance. Catchy li’l tune, though. Even without a chorus.
Side one closes with “Artifical Light”, a eulogy for a closed bar. Spare song, bare winter trees. One verse, one mournful mood. Guided by Voices never ended an LP side like this.
They also never started side two with a weirdo thing like “People Are Leaving”. The music by Stephanie Sayers sounds like nothing that Pollard has ever worked with previously. It’s a pretty, piano-heavy piece that comes off like something from a film score. On top of it, Pollard lays down TWO simultaneous melodies. “People are Leaving”, a song about mourning the dead, dominates, but there’s also a whole other unrelated song happening just beneath it like sounds heard through the wall in a cheap motel. It sounds like a classic Guided by Voices tape machine mistake that Pollard decided to leave in, but I don’t know. And I don’t think I want to know.
“Steeple of Knives” rocks, but is in the same funk as everything else. It’s a song about a loveless state. “We build our island towers high”.
It’s after midnight and the moon is high and covered with gray clouds on “Rumbling Joker”, a disarmingly beautiful and weary ballad.
On “Showbiz Opera Walrus”, the circus is in town, but it’s an evil circus. The clowns are drunk and scary. The backing music might be festive if it wasn’t slowed and warped into a nightmare. “The road to excess is a time bomb”. I think it’s a song about the dark side of a dream.
We get one last little ghostly heartbreaker, “Pick Seeds from My Skull” (the prettiest song to ever have the word “skull” in the title, probably), before closer “Second Step Next Language” sends us down the yawning 3 AM highway where the shadows take over. I think it’s a song about the writing process (“On a good day/ It’s a puzzle in the stars/ And it’s the offspring growing from broken jars”; also, I love the idea of a fiction writer referring to him or herself as “a competent selector of lies”.)
And that’s how Pollard leaves us, with a song about an artist’s comfort with their abilities (“I’m a pro at it/ Direct from humble pie”) and with an oddly satisfying extended guitar dirge outro that sounds like an engine humming or a machine still working even at this late hour.
This was Pollard’s only new record in 1998. It might look on the surface like this was a sleepy year for him, but it wasn’t. The reformed Guided by Voices (Doug Gillard, Greg Demos and ex-Breeders drummer Jim MacPherson) spent winter and spring laying down a pile of demos for Ric Ocasek. In the summer, they went to New York City and recorded the next GBV album, Do the Collapse, and then they sat on it for a year because Pollard insisted that it come out on a major label, which took time.
Meanwhile, the new GBV warmed up with the odd live show here and there. The recording of their first set–March 28, 1998 in Columbus, Ohio–spread fast in the tape-trading circles. It was essential. All of the geeks had it. The sound was half-decent and it was the debut of nineteen new songs. Waved Out songs a few months early. Do the Collapse songs almost a year-and-a-half early. Future B-sides and outtakes. All were live and rough and weirdly perfect that way. It was the sound an artist unswayed from the task and feeling good about his future, sure that it will all work out somehow. Even if the hits don’t happen. Which they didn’t. And who cares?
Today, you can hear that old “punk rock party” on Youtube.