Howling Wolf Orchestra
Speedtraps for the Bee Kingdom
2000, The Fading Captain Series
2000 was a strange year for new music from Robert Pollard. The optimistic energy that defined 1999 was gone. Pollard would gain it back in time, but for now it was all used up.
And it happened so suddenly. Back then, I thought that maybe the tour had wiped him out. Or maybe Pollard’s moody dirges of 2000 were an escape from the music business bullshit, a retreat into non-commercial sounds after months of playing the major label game.
Those of us in the spectator seats didn’t know what was happening in Pollard’s personal life at the time, you see.
We didn’t know yet about the divorce.
For us, the big story of 2000 was Suitcase, the 4-CD box set of unreleased songs that spanned the previous twenty-five years. Big Trouble was a ten-year-old recording. (I wonder if going through these old tapes at the time was a kind of therapy for Pollard, who has a weakness for nostalgia.) The Hold on Hope EP was dominated by Do the Collapse outtakes that were about a year-and-a-half old when they came out.
In the midst of this were two slim little records of new music. There was the bleak “Dayton, OH 19-Something-and-5” 7″ from the first half of the year and this limited EP released toward the end of the year and that isn’t much brighter.
The Howling Wolf Orchestra are three guys: Robert Pollard, his brother Jim Pollard and GBV guitarist Nate Farley. Everyone’s credited for almost everything (drums, bass, piano, guitar), except that Pollard is the only singer. The photos of Pollard and Farley on the inner sleeve look like mugshots. They look like the end of a tour. They look like lost sleep, too much beer and no sun.
They’re still standing, though–and they’ve got new music.
Something about the freedom of this record has always reminded me of old Krautrock via Ohio. It’s spacey. Nocturnal. Also, unfriendly. Pollard’s vocal performances mostly come off like he’s winging them from short poems in his notebooks.
Opening track “You Learn Something Old Every Day” piles a primitive drum loop onto an ascending bed of drama that sounds like something from a film score.
Second track “I.B.C” (short for Insane Building Concepts) drags us a few miles further out into the night in less than a minute. “Kill the lights”, Pollard says with insistence, in case you haven’t figured out yet this record is going to be a dark one.
The third track is the set’s pop song, or something close to it. In “I’m Dirty”, Pollard is in the middle of a long tour and he’s not proud of everything that he’s doing (“drink, shave, bump uglies/ God knows what else”), but it’s nothing that can’t be exorcised via a two-minute melody. Guided by Voices played it live for awhile in 2001.
“It’s a Bad Ticket” closes out the side with Pollard doing a slam poetry thing about raw deals over a nicely sloppy groove that just barely lasts over a minute.
If side A of this record is 3 AM, side B is 4 AM. Two of its four tracks are instrumentals, which is rare for Pollard, but they’re not bad. “Is it Mostly? (It is Mostly)” is a mix of silly piano and violent drums that almost sounds like something from the Twin Peaks score. Closing track “Fruit Weapon” is a ridiculous guitar-shredder (Greg Demos on lead) with a gloomy backbeat.
The two vocal songs aren’t any more accessible. “Satyr at Styx & Rubicon” kicks up mythological imagery and heavy vocal slapback. “Where is Out There?” is the tender acoustic moment, but with more ghostly echo that sounds nightmarish.
Speedtraps for the Bee Kingdom is a record that has its back turned to you. Across his vast body of work, Pollard sometimes takes you down the dark roads of Weird Country and that’s what this record does. It’s a cry in the night. If you follow his music closely, you’re gonna get an oddball like this one every now and then. Last year, it was the Nightwalker LP. Coming up next year, we’ve got the debut of Circus Devils, which I loved then and still love now, but that confused some people at the time.
In James Greer’s book Guided by Voices: A Brief History, there’s a short chapter called “What I’ve Learned” written by Robert Pollard himself. It’s a list of wise and funny aphorisms and the one that sticks with me the most goes:
Writing is easy. It’s an ongoing process, like eating, breathing, or sleeping. It shouldn’t be painful or difficult. It’s a report on the state of the soul and, like the soul, should be continuously evolving.
That’s this record. This is the state of Pollard’s soul, but he never tells us outright. He never uses the word “divorce”. Instead, he paints abstract pictures of decay and frustration. None of these songs are happy. Maybe “I’m Dirty” finds some peace, but it’s fleeting.
On this record, black clouds roll in–and they would hang around for all of 2001, a year packed with new Pollard music.
Enough time had passed on TVT Records’ schedule for it to be cool for a new Guided by Voices album to come out–and that would be the next place for Pollard to talk about his blues, but in a different way.
The Howling Wolf Orchestra can crash and burn, but Guided by Voices always reach for the light. More on that soon.
thank you for doing this weird and sad little album justice.