Guided by Voices
Isolation Drills
2001, TVT Records
Robert Pollard gave the mainstream dream of fame and big money and an overplayed radio hit that eventually annoys everyone exactly as many chances as it deserves.
Two.
A restless artist like Pollard can’t beat his head against that wall for too long.
Two shots. That’s enough. In most cases, the first album is the best that the band can do at the time in this new place and with these new expectations. The second is for sharpening their blade and improving on whatever wasn’t quite perfect about the first.
Obviously, Robert Pollard, with his fifteen years of putting out good records at the time, didn’t need to “find himself” after Do the Collapse, but there are a few things about it that the band had to throw off before they could move on to this second grab at the golden apple.
1. THE PRODUCER SITUATION
For the previous LP, Pollard hired a legend, Ric Ocasek, and then went along with pretty much whatever he said, even when it meant putting a song on the album that Pollard wrote but didn’t like. The band paid big bucks for Mr. Heartbeat City’s proven commercial instincts as much as for his studio know-how. To not listen to him would be a waste of money.
Now, going by everything that I’ve read, the whole band speaks fondly of working with Ocasek. It was an experience worth having. The worst story I’ve heard is that Ocasek got irritated when some of the guys went drinking before a session (he was opposed to that sort of thing). Best I can tell though, everything else was biscuits and gravy.
However, I think that Pollard also learned a lesson about bringing in a high-profile auteur producer to work with Guided by Voices. It sounds like a cool idea, but it means compromising his own vision and giving the Big Shot equal power over the finished work as him (again, to do otherwise would be a waste of money). And I think that Pollard came away from it never wanting to do that again.
Dr. Dre was not going to produce GBV’s second TVT album. Neither was Nigel Godrich or “Flood” or Bob Rock.
Instead, they went with a young fella named Rob Schnapf, whose credits included work with the likes of Beck, Elliot Smith and The Foo Fighters. Schnapf didn’t care if anyone drank in the studio. Also, with Schnapf, the band felt at liberty to dirty up the sound with a tiny bit of lo-fi interference.
The record would still sound major label as shit, big as Godzilla and ready for the radio–Schnapf did a great job–but with a tasteful drizzle of classic Guided by Voices, home-recorded weirdness. Just a little dib-dab of it makes a statement that even though this is a slicker Guided by Voices, this is not a different Guided by Voices. It’s the same vision traveling to new places.
2. FUCK “HOLD ON HOPE”
By 2001, “Hold on Hope” was banished from the band’s live set and a dead issue commercially. According to Pollard, the song came to him in a dream that he later decided was a bad dream. In it though, Ocasek heard potential radio gold.
Didn’t happen.
What that meant for Isolation Drills is that its main offering to the radio gods was free to be completely different. It was free to be a classic GBV anthem to crush all other anthems. It was free to be “Glad Girls”, the band’s best and most aggressive play EVER for radio rotation. It’s loud and pounding and it comes at you like one gigantic chorus–it starts with the chorus–that happens over and over, drilling itself ALLLLLL THE WAY into your brain.
That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with soft, pretty songs. Pollard is a melody freak. He writes great ballads. Part of why “Hold on Hope” is so painful is because he can do much better than that.
Exhibit A: This album’s lovely “Unspirited”. It sparkles in the darkest hour. It’s a song about sadness, but there is always a light to walk toward. It may be far away, but it’s there. “Unspirited” is gorgeous enough to convince you of that, at least. Coulda been a single.
3. WHAT’S NEXT? HOW ABOUT WHO’S NEXT?
Anyone who understood the ambition that simmered just under the lo-fi surface of albums such as Alien Lanes or who saw the band’s live show knew that GBV had a serious Who’s Next stadium-shaker album in them.
As good as it is, that isn’t Do the Collapse. It’s too bright and eager overall. It’s not haunted.
No, GBV in the studio wouldn’t capture the sound of a hard, scarred, seasoned classic rock band until Isolation Drills. Its sixteen songs rock, rage, mourn and celebrate. Pollard’s songwriting rides high and the band roars. They punch us in the face in the hard rockers, make moonflowers bloom in the dark ballads and can ride a dreamy and cathartic groove.
Isolation Drills is GBV’s Who’s Next, no question. It’s powerful and moody.
When they made Who’s Next, The Who was a group run ragged, but determined to fight for their life. It emerged from the wreckage of an ambitious failed project (Lifehouse) that almost broke up the band. It’s where that record gets its intensity.
Isolation Drills is also troubled, but by “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”, as Tammy Wynette would put it.
Pollard’s marriage of about twenty years fell apart at the same time that GBV was out conquering the world in 1999 and 2000. He cheated while on the road. His wife found out. You can guess the rest.
I’m not Gary Gossip, but Pollard openly talked about this in piles of interviews back in 2001 and he’s come clean about his role in it, so it’s on the table. It’s a part of Isolation Drills. It’s the storm cloud that hangs over every song. You can’t NOT talk about it when dealing with this record.
Pollard first wrote about the end of his marriage about a year earlier on the lo-fi solo acoustic B-sides of the “Dayton, Ohio-19 Something and 5” 7″ single, but in such a cryptic way that dorks like me had no idea what he was going on about. They just seemed like sad little stories. We didn’t know yet that Pollard was talking about himself.
Later in 2000, the Speedtraps for the Bee Kingdom EP (from one-off side-project The Howling Wolf Orchestra) was even more cryptic, but anyone could hear the darkness in it. It was a record that confessed little on its cold surfaces except that Pollard was in a mood.
By spring of 2001 though, when Isolation Drills was released, everything was out in the open. Guided by Voices had this melancholy new album in the racks and Pollard freely explained why to any writer who asked.
He got divorced. He moved out of his house. His life was a mess.
And here’s a stack of killer rock songs about it.
It opens with “Fair Touching”, a new take on a song from two years earlier. This version polishes the original’s garage rock edges into luscious power pop with a curiously sad heart. I think that the lyrics are about insect mating, but Pollard sings it like it’s a break-up song. The beautiful melody gets you swaying and sets you up perfectly for “Skills Like This” to rock your block off.
“Fair Touching” may not be a “Baba O’Riley” (nor does it try to be), but the slam-bang “Skills Like This” is my idea of a “Bargain”. This is not going to just be a sad album. There’s some fury here, too.
Made-to-order single “Chasing Heather Crazy” follows and keeps our heads swimming in melody. It sounds bright and happy on the surface, but there’s a hint of darkness in the lyrics (“And her mother will greet you/ And a river will reach you/ Breaking out to make you slave again”). Maybe you have to play the song a hundred times before you notice that, but this is a song worth playing a hundred times.
Track 4 “Frostman” brings the cool down, as well as a sweet taste of lo-fi. It’s a lovely lullaby that Pollard recorded by himself on 4-track with only an acoustic guitar. I have no special reverence for lo-fi GBV over studio GBV, but I do love the “patchwork” sound of many of Pollard’s best records. It’s that collage artist’s freedom to throw any wild thing on the record if it feels right. Lo-fi, hi-fi, pop songs, weird stuff. Pollard’s albums live on friction. How does a group of songs work together to surprise you and thrill you and maybe even, at first, confuse you? In less than a minute, “Frostman” brings that back to Guided by Voices and its cozy vibes color everything that follows.
The warmth bleeds into “Twilight Campfighter”, a pensive anthem about dark times. I interpret the Twilight Campfighter as a guardian angel figure. And, if you ask me, a “guardian angel” is really nothing but a personification of our own resolve. Or our good luck. When Pollard put together a Best of Guided by Voices collection for Matador Records in 2003, this was one of a few left-field choices that made the cut.
After a sensitive moment that like that, surely a rocker or something weird will follow, right? This is Guided by Voices. That’s what they do.
But no, next is one of the most hushed and defeated songs on the album. “Sister I Need Wine” is only a voice, a guitar, a cello and a melody that sounds great naked. It’s also the sound of Pollard leaning into this record’s dark vibes.
After that, we get our rocker. “Want One?” brings muscle and acid and a guitar part that sounds inspired by the Twilight Zone theme all in a compact container (less than two minutes). The band recorded it in Dayton with John Shough, apart from the Rob Schnapf sessions. It’s mastered to fit in with the rest of record’s sonics, but you can hear a hint of homemade warmth in there.
I like it, but it’s mostly a set-up for “The Enemy”.
Pollard has a taste for moody, mid-tempo groove rockers. They’re often his favorites to perform live. In this period, he would usually slot them in the latter half of side 1 on the LP. Sometimes they have choruses, sometimes they don’t. They never drone though because of Pollard’s natural way with a melody. Also with Doug Gillard in the band, Pollard feels confident that the guitar work can match the explosive thing that he hears in his head.
On Do the Collapse, it was “In Stitches”. On Isolation Drills, it’s “The Enemy”, which is better. On the next GBV album, Universal Truths and Cycles, it would be “Storm Vibrations”, which is even better.
“The Enemy” is still a giant, though. It talks to us about pain and guilt and everything gone wrong. Its first lines: “Look me straight/ Now blame it on loneliness.” After seven tracks that only hint at what’s really happening underneath these songs, “The Enemy” opens up. Still, the lyrics only tell half of its story. The glorious, tension-builder music tells the other half. It sounds like the end of side 1, but there’s one more song after it because this record is packed. After we’ve met “The Enemy”, “Unspirited” sweetly sings the curtains closed.
The flipside starts loud and proud and with “Glad Girls”. Side 2, track 1. The classic slot for the single.
Side 2 settles into a power rock streak for the next few songs. Pollard shouts to the back of the arena in the wearily rocking “Run Wild” (when I saw GBV in Dallas in 2001, I still remember that they opened with this song and that it kicked ass all over the room) and then the band confidently assumes a T. Rex strut in the bulldozing “Pivotal Film”, which I think is about pornography.
While Pollard’s showing us his scars, he also takes time to sneer at his critics in “How’s My Drinking?”, a simple and oddly beautiful middle finger to those who take issue with Pollard’s beer-hoisting persona. His defense: He just likes to drink. Also, “to hell with my church bells”. Also, “I won’t change”. No apologies. That’s it. Cut. Print.
It’s a perfect lead-in to “The Brides Have Hit Glass”, in which Pollard REALLY spills his divorce story. His side of it, at least. There’s no ambiguity to it. The lyrics shoot the shit in plain talk, very little poetic imagery. Pollard has turned this pain into pop and it’s gorgeous.
I’ve always enjoyed the song’s light country leanings. That’s THE genre for divorce songs. The band plays it like power pop, but there’s a hint of a whisper of a twang in Pollard’s vocal. When you’re confessin’ about your divorce and about how at least half of it is your fault, you’ve gotta do it with a twang, I guess. You’ve gotta channel your inner George Jones. I can hang with that. Pollard doesn’t go there very often (with the exception of his bizarre Cash Rivers project almost twenty years later), but I like it when he does.
“The Brides Have Hit Glass” is not a country song, but I could still go for a Dwight Yoakam cover. Just sayin’.
If Pollard talks to us on “The Bride Have Hit Glass”, the next song “Fine to See You” talks to the ex. It has a 1950s quality. Simple lyrics. Wounded performance. Pollard knows that he can’t fix the damage in a song, but he can say goodbye and “I’m sorry”. There is no neat ending to this story.
The album, however, has a beautiful ending.
The closing credits roll to “Privately”. As strings swirl around the band, Pollard sings about the world’s busy bodies. The people who don’t mind their own business. The people who post on the internet that they saw him with some strange girl at a show. All of the people on the communication chain that relayed the news of Pollard’s road infidelity back to the family. (“Before most of us know it/ Contagious words have bitten/ Don’t use them/ Don’t post them for broadcast/ Keep them private and away/ Like an old weapon”)
In the song, he’s feeling raw, but resigned. There’s a touch of rage in the lyrics while the music is dreamy. Put them together and a certain acceptance of it all emerges.
Pollard did what he did. What happened happened. And fuck me if I can judge. I have no idea how happy or unhappy Pollard’s marriage was before all of this. I wasn’t there.
All that I have is this music. These sad songs, these angry songs, these yearning songs. Put them all together and they tell of a zig-zag of emotions that all come from the same source of pain and regret.
I like that Pollard never outright bashes his wife in these songs (unless there are spiteful moments in the lyrics that only she would get, I don’t know). I also like that Pollard never preaches or tries to teach us lessons about how to live our lives. There’s no moral to the story.
Maybe the best thing is just moving on.
And Pollard would move on. This is the first of four albums that he put out in 2001.
Pollard would move on like hell.
Isolation Drills is the closing of a book, not just on Pollard’s marriage and not just on his TVT Records contract, but on his attempt at breaking Guided by Voices into the big-time. This was the last-ditch effort. Every last drop of inspiration and motivation that Pollard had toward that ambition went into it. If the radio doesn’t want this album’s roundhouse punch of hooks and ultra-commercial sound then it doesn’t want Guided by Voices at all, no matter what they do.
There’s nowhere to go after Isolation Drills, except back home.