Circus Devils
Ringworm Interiors
2001, The Fading Captain Series
Sometimes on the internet, an innocent lamb who’s in the middle of discovering Robert Pollard’s body of work will step forward and ask where they should start with Circus Devils.
It’s a fair question. At fourteen albums released over sixteen years, this collaboration with fellow Ohioan oddballs Todd and Tim Tobias is not only Pollard’s longest-running side project, but it’s also the strangest. Their sound is a kind of psychedelic rock birthed from a mutant strain. It’s a creature that rose up out of toxic waste. Lots of slime, lots of teeth.
There are quiet Circus Devils records and loud ones and ones that sound like they were created by lizard men from Jupiter. Sometimes they sound like a rock band, sometimes they sound like mad scientists performing sinister experiments in a backyard tool shed. Their records are as varied as dreams, and often as haunting.
Their music comes in a few different flavors, but it all has a demon inside of it. There’s an eeriness in every sound that they make (Pollard got into the spirit and timed most of their albums for a Halloween release). It hides somewhere in even the project’s gentlest moments.
It’s a demon that runs naked and free and howling at the moon on their unhinged first record.
So, where to start with Circus Devils?
I say start at the BEGINNING. Start with Ringworm Interiors. Meet the demon. Get the full Circus Devils experience. Be surprised and assaulted like we were back in 2001 with what’s still one of the most bugfuck albums in Pollard’s whole discography.
Continue reading “Robert Pollard-Mania! #64: RINGWORM INTERIORS”