Lifeguards
Mist King Urth
2003, The Fading Captain Series
Many of us who came of age with 90s American indie rock were told that pretty much the whole genre of progressive rock was complete garbage. If music journalists at the time mentioned the old prog dinosaurs at all, it was to run them down as the reason why punk needed to happen. Sid Vicious and Johnny Thunders died so that you don’t have to listen to incomprehensible concept albums and sidelong suites. Some outsider scenes in Germany and Canterbury in England were okay. King Crimson got respect as an influence on the “math-rock” bands. In general though, 1970s excesses were as cool to most 90s indie kids as a misspelling on a neck tattoo.
I know because I was there and I was one of those pipsqueaks. Young people need guidance when navigating decades of music history. Critics are always around for that, though cool family members or friends are even better. When your favorite songwriters and musicians have interesting tastes, that’s a great resource, too.
What I’m trying to say is that it was about 1998 when I finally stopped automatically flipping past old prog-rock LPs in the bins and I started to give them a chance and I did that PURELY because of Robert Pollard. He was my guru. When he talked in interviews about bands he liked or made the occasional list of favorites (The Beatles, Wire, Genesis, The Who, and Devo were always at the top), I paid close attention.
In the little indie rock island that I lived on at the time, he was the only one who talked about this rejected old shit. He was the only one mentioning The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. He got me curious.
So I dug in and I dug what I heard. And prog’s influence on Pollard’s music was plain as day. It was like a secret passage opening up.
When I talk about music with American white guys who are about his age (Pollard was born in 1957), it’s not uncommon for them to have a soft spot for that stuff. They were teenagers when the likes of Yes and Jethro Tull were among the biggest bands in the world, They have fond memories of Emerson, Lake & Palmer performing their brain salad surgery on the pot smoke-filled rows on the stadium circuit. They listened to Traffic while stoned in their bedrooms.
They remember a time when “serious” rock bands were all about big ideas. Concept albums, rock operas, song cycles. Double LPs. Much of it came from British bands who grew their hair past their shoulders as they banged away in one 60s rock scene or another. Through some combination of changing times, drugs, and perhaps a notion that rock’s next frontier was in a European sensibility (theatrical presentations, classical influences) as opposed to the American blues sounds that loomed large before, progressive rock was born.
To young people all over the world, it was cool fuckin’ shit–and Robert Pollard was one of those young people.
That prog influence is the weird wrinkle that distinguishes Guided by Voices from so much lo-fi 90s music. One of the haunting things about Guided by Voices was that you could hear that they were always bigger in their minds than the damaged sound that came out of your speakers. You can also see it in the trippy homemade sleeve art and, if you listen close, can discern it in the strange, yet meticulous, sequencing on Guided by Voices albums.
As for this record’s co-creator, Doug Gillard (born in 1965), I’ve never gotten prog-dude vibes from his music, but he’s been around the block. He gets the references and he’s versatile as hell.
The first thing that you need to know about Lifeguards is that Gillard composes and records the music and Pollard comes up with songs to lay on top. We are in the “postal rock” zone here. It’s a place where we’ve been before with Airport 5 (with Tobin Sprout), Circus Devils (with Todd and Tim Tobias), and Go Back Snowball (with Mac MacCaughan). We’ve been here with Doug Gillard before, too. He composed the backing music for “Mice Feel Nice (In My Room)” for the Tigerbomb EP that came out way back in 1995. The song “Caught Waves Again” from Pollard’s 1998 Waved Out solo album is a “Pollard/Gillard” affair. Some of the best tracks on Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, a 1999 LP full of Pollard and Gillard goodness, are rooted in Gillard’s own instrumental pieces.
The second thing that you need to know is that at this time, Pollard had a prog-rock itch to scratch. It was a major presence in everything he was putting out. That was probably what Pollard and Gillard talked about before making Mist King Urth, but on these collaboration records, I tend to credit the music guy as the one who sets the tone.
Here, one-man-band Doug Gillard goes for the sound of 1973. Big, flashy guitars. Piano-driven drama. Occasional synthesizers and even some wind instruments here and there. Gillard sounds like he’s revisiting an old school from a long time ago and yet still knows his way around.
He also gets that prog-rock was messy. It mixed with English glitter rock and folk and it was the default category for oddballs such as Peter Hammill, who sometimes anticipated punk in his ravings. Gillard has probably also heard Be-Bop Deluxe and Steve Harley, who weren’t pure prog, but who were on the arty side when it came to big 70s visions . In one track, Gillard might reach for the stadiums of decades’ past. In the next, he’s so quiet that he doesn’t bother with drums.
His work here is a lesson in how a one-man-band does prog. Maybe you don’t have Rick Wakeman to bounce ideas off of in the studio, but go for a diversity of moods, tempos, and arrangements and you can still take the listener on a trip. Make us end up in a different place from where we started. When it all comes together, it can feel like an epic.
Mist King Urth starts with “Gift of The Mountain”, a guitars-only instrumental in which you can hear the squeaks off the strings as vividly as you can hear the stoner riffing. It’s the set-up. It’s only ninety seconds long. It’s meant to build anticipation. It’s the sound of a curtain opening. It’s the prog-rock way.
Mist King Urth ends with “Red Whips and Miracles”, an eight-and-a-half-minute bliss-out. Pollard only has words for about two-and-a-half minutes of it before he lets the music walk us up to the moon. I don’t mind. Gillard keeps it dreamy.
In between those two moments are nine tracks that bring pyrotechnics and the pastoral.
Guided by Voices played “Starts At the River” live for awhile. The “band” on the record is warmed up now and they’re all swagger. When Pollard sings, he reaches for higher notes than usual because that’s what you do with prog-rock. You expand your range.
“First of An Early Go-Getter” is this LP’s boldest laser show. Gillard lays on the drama thick. His guitar is a neverending upward staircase and his keyboards only keep going up. Meanwhile, Pollard intones on top with a flummoxing set of words.
We go for a pleasant countryside trample in “Society Dome”. Gillard grows a garden full of acoustic guitar, woodwinds, and melody while Pollard bounces off it with a song that I think is about the struggle to transcend the expectations that people have for you.
On “Shorter Virgins”, Gillard flies through a speedy rocker that in this context sounds like an early 70s English art-rock band getting down with their 60s freakbeat roots, but extra dirty and wild, and accidentally anticipating punk in the process. There’s something weird about it, at least. Maybe it’s Pollard’s words giving off that effect. I can’t pin any particular mood to his song here. (“Dumb looks good/ In man’s man’s paradise/ Follow the bite marks/ Do you like something nice?”).
Side one closes with “No Chain Breaking”, which is probably my sleeper favorite. The song is one of Pollard’s motivational moments. It’s about breaking bad habits and pursuing ambitions. It’s also about a quietly seductive melody. Meanwhile, Gillard’s music breathes in and out while laying down lovely tension. In a likably odd touch, there are no drums until about two-and-a-half minutes in.
On side two, “Sea of Dead” is another instrumental curtain-opener, but much prettier this time. It provides delicious contrast to “Surgeon is Complete”, the LP’s top rocker. If Jimmy Page heard this in 1968, he probably would have stolen it whole hog and given himself credit. It’s massive. It’s great. And Pollard is really with it. His words are typically weird, but when he shouts through the outro, you can hear him fulfilling an old teenage dream. The quirky, quiet bridge is a nice psychedelic twist.
“Then We Agree” provides the comedown. Pollard plays freely over Gillard’s drumless groove.
“Fether Herd” is two-minute instrumental tribal blast that’s our last jarring moment before “Red Whips and Miracles” closes up shop.
In another of this album’s quirks, its lengthy finale is not an extended heavy freakout. It’s more like a hypnotic muscle-relaxer. The main character for much of it is a piano that fixates on a fetching repeated lick, while the rest of the arrangment moves around it like the ocean’s tide. When the lead guitar gently trades places with it, the change feels natural and right and I’m swaying right up to the fade-out.
As for Pollard’s (brief) song, it’s important to note that this album came out at the start of the Iraq War, which I followed obsessively at the time, At work, I was glued to talk radio. Press conferences. Donald Rumsfeld. Shock & awe. WMDs. At home, I’d tune into religious TV, where you’d hear about the war from a chilling Biblical angle.
I’m an 80s kid. Grew up hearing about nuclear war all of the time. End of the world stuff always grabs me.
The TV evangelists I watched in ’03 talked about how the American army was going to battle at the site of the oldest civilization in the world. Ancient Babylon. Current Iraq. Its fate is to fall, after which a new era of peace will come and a charismatic leader who turns out to be the Antichrist will emerge and then The Book of Revelation charges full steam ahead, baby. The prophets were right.
I didn’t buy all of that, but I was keeping an open mind.
As I write this, it’s almost twenty years later and I guess that we’re in an era that sorta resembles peace if you squint, but I’m still watching for that charismatic leader.
In spring of 2003, Pollard’s lyrics were eerily in tune with the tin cans that rattled in my head, with imagery of protests, war and apocalypse (“The fresh preamble/ To a nuclear future/ The morning curse/ Sunfist”). “Red Whips and Miracles” creeped me out, but in a good way. In a rock ‘n’ roll way.
This is a strange album. It’s “prog” that aggressively colors outside of the lines. It takes left turns. It doesn’t play to any crowd in 2003.
It’s a record that no one was asking for, but Pollard and Gillard made it anyway.
I wouldn’t recommend it to big prog nerds. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who just heard Bee Thousand yesterday. If you come to this purely as a Gillard fan, I’m not 100% sure that you’ll be on board with this side-trip.
This one is for the deep-diggers. It’s for the people who either heard Pollard’s prog sympathies right away or who caught on eventually. It’s for the freaks. It’s for the ones who can’t get enough. It’s for the ones who continued to follow Pollard’s Fading Captain Series label–this is #27–and got a kick out of how after four years, he was still finding ways to make each new release sound (and look) distinct from the others.
I guess that I would recommend Mist King Urth most to those who are comfortable ending up somewhere different from where they started.
this was one of the first non-gbv pollard albums i ever heard. i bought it when i was just learning about the other projects. i knew “paradise is not so bad” (i think) but knew nothing about “mist king urth” or what was on it. 14-year-old me was blown away and this album still stands as one of bob’s (and doug’s) greatest efforts.