Robert Pollard and His Soft Rock Renegades
Choreographed Man of War
2001, The Fading Captain Series
Choreographed Man of War is a raw and yet weirdly theatrical rock ‘n’ roll album from a guy who’s (mostly) done talking about his divorce and wants to get happy again.
If Isolation Drills, which came out a mere three months earlier, confessed sins and left blood on the walls, this one just roars and makes your ears ring. Still, the two records sound to me like curious companions.
Both Guided by Voices albums on TVT Records have follow-ups on Pollard’s own Fading Captain Series label that feel deliberate in how they complement and contrast what came before. In the warm tones that issue from your speakers, they’re the sound of Pollard washing off the major label stink, scrubbing it away with tape hiss and homemade sleeve art. They’re albums free of the music business bullshit, the expensive studio time and the label heads and their opinions.
It goes deeper, though.
Do the Collapse has an unofficial companion in Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, an album that I argue is about the experience of going major label, playing the game and chasing the dream. Do the Collapse is like a Hollywood movie and Speak Kindly is its director’s commentary, in pop song form, about the circus that surrounded it.
As for Isolation Drills, Pollard follows up its divorce blues with an album that, to put it bluntly, comes off partly composed of songs about his new girlfriend. It gets lovey-dovey in moments, but it’s a tortured love. Tentative. Damaged. “You wanted to be alone/ But I don’t want you to be alone.” Also, “Under skies dark with alienation/ We exchange love like radiation”. The divorce is a character on this album, but it’s not the main character anymore. It’s there. It’s in the room, but other things are happening. It’s Isolation Drills as told from a different angle.
Interestingly, this LP not only doesn’t come with a lyric sheet, but in 2001 when you went to the lyrics page of the old school official GBV website (a huge part of GBV fandom back in the steam-powered days of the internet and that’s thankfully preserved on the band’s current site) and clicked on Choreographed Man of War, you were greeted with this message:
IT IS MR. POLLARD’S INTENT NOT TO INCLUDE ANY LYRICS WITH THIS ALBUM
JUST PUT ON THE HEADPHONES AND LISTEN
I can hang with that.
Enough with the drama. Enough about Pollard’s rough year. Let’s rock. We need it. Hey, songs can just be songs. The artist’s life and what’s happening in it can’t help but shape things, but that doesn’t mean that every song is a fucking diary entry.
So, let’s put on our headphones and listen.
Let’s relax and dig the noise.
One thing that I love about this album is that it’s from the same skeleton crew who made Kid Marine, but the vibe here is completely different.
Pollard’s go-to studio guy at the time, John Shough, records the affair toasty warm as usual. You hear the mics and cables and amps and the air in the room–and I swear that I can hear Pollard spark up a cigarette lighter before he begins to sing “Instrument Beetle”.
Meanwhile, the band, the Soft Rock Renegades, is Pollard with Greg Demos (on bass and most of the flashy lead guitar parts) and Jim MacPherson (on drums, also credited as “tank commander”, whatever that means). At the time, both had recently left Guided by Voices to go be grown-ups, but obviously there were no hard feelings.
A couple years ago, these same fellas made Kid Marine, a dreamy art-rock record with a garage band sensibility. It sounds banged out in the best way, powered with simple tools and a psychedelic vision.
Choreographed turns that inside out and comes off as a garage record made with an art-band’s sensibility. It’s all about rock, the riffy and anthemic kind, except for when it’s all about perfect melodies, the timeless and pretty kind. Along the path it takes curious little prog turns in a way that’s wholly unpretentious and natural. It’s just how this bird flies.
Pollard’s comfort with what he calls “the four P’s” of good rock–pop, prog, psych and punk–is strong here. In his hands, they sound like they belong together as comfortably as King Crimson and The Kinks might sit next to each other on an alphabetized record shelf.
It’s said that a perfect cocktail is about the tension between the ingredients. They should all be present. If you’re mixing a bunch of shit together to mask cheap gin, you’re doing it all wrong. Everything in the drink should sing.
Pollard’s records are like that. In his prog you can still taste the punk and in his pop you can taste the psych. It’s all there–and it’s all here in these ten songs.
The hard-rocking “I Drove a Tank” kicks in the door and then the pretty and spooky “She Saw the Shadow” turns the splinters into fluttering night birds.
By the third song, we know this album is gonna be great. “Edison’s Memos” is a gorgeous verse interrupted by two bridges that then switch back to the verse. It’s got no chorus, but it still plays like a grand, sweeping piece of pop. There’s nothing weird about it until you start to think about it.
The album dives deeper into melody with “7th Level Shutdown”. It’s a drunkard’s lament. It’s a hangover song. It’s also a love song even if we’re not sure that things are going well on that front. It’s pure naked beauty.
Side 1 crashes to a close and gets Biblical with “40 Yard to the Burning Bush”, as well it should. Rock ‘n’ roll has roots in gospel. That’s where it gets some of its fury.
On side 2, “Aerial” begins like a whisper, but then, true to its title, ascends upward to a dreamy place before it drifts away to make room for the twinned face punches of “Citizen Fighter” and “Kickboxer Lightning”, two songs that sound like they were meant to kick ass together–or at least sound like a couple of lost skull-crushers from The Who.
The album’s most obvious art-rock move comes with “Bally Hoo”, a reprise of riffs and hooks that we just heard condensed together as its own song. It’s musical theater as gloriously bashed out as anything else here. What, you didn’t know that these were showtunes?
Well, they ARE–and so is the grand finale, “Instrument Beetle”.
It’s seven minutes that strip away everything except for a weathered heart. It brings the album’s quietest moments and its noisiest. In its beginning, Pollard sounds like he’s in a spotlight, surrounded by darkness, as he sings over a simple, lone guitar. More stage lights come on when the drums kick in and things gets louder from there. Pollard’s song, meanwhile, is a curiously structureless string of pretty, yearning melodies. It’s got no chorus, but it’s got choreography as it moves us toward the conclusion.
In the theater, that sometimes means backup singers or some other big production move, to underscore the tragic or uplifting closing note.
Pollard doesn’t have backup singers, unless you count Matador art director Mark Ohe’s rambling, candid answering machine message about his dating problems and that Pollard samples here. At first it’s an inaudible human voice that creeps in toward the end of the song, like a stray radio signal, like a random piece of fuzz, but by the end, when we can finally hear what Ohe is saying, it becomes the album’s punchline about the complications of love.
Pollard also doesn’t have big production, nor does he want that sort of thing here. Instead, a closing dirge will do it. Play one part faster and faster, over and over again, until it means everything and nothing, until your catharsis is in the noise itself.
That’s the rock ‘n’ roll turn in this piece of theater.
In rock ‘n’ roll, noise always matters.