Circus Devils
Five
2005, The Fading Captain Series
I listen to the fourth Circus Devils album, Five, only at night and never during the day.
Listening to Five with the sun in your face feels as wrong as watching Eraserhead at noon in your living room with the blinds open and the sound of kids playing outside.
Some things need darkness and nothing else going on around it. It’s about your attention and how it’s focused. Some things will never come alive for you if it’s not allowed to pummel your senses.
Speaking of Eraserhead, I saw it in a theater last May. I’d seen David Lynch’s 1978 landmark many times before, but this was my first big screen viewing. 35mm print. Beautiful analog image and sound. Respectful audience. Perfect mood. (Love ya, Texas Theatre.) What struck me most in that setting was how LOUD the movie is. The sound of Eraserhead–hums, hisses, squeaks, wind, industrial noises–hangs heavy in the room and envelops you. At moments, I found myself thinking more about the sounds I heard than what I saw on the screen.
There are many extraordinary things about Eraserhead and one is how much it builds its world on sound. Lynch is intense about that and it’s something that’s easy to lose outside of a darkened theater.
What I’m getting at is that when you listen to Five, I recommend shutting off the lights, Pick your favorite immersion method. Maybe it’s kicking back with headphones and your eyes closed or driving at night or going for a walk in the moonlight with a set of earbuds in your skull (all great ways to listen to music). Do whatever works for you to get into the cinema of this record. It’s my favorite Pollard release of 2005 and it deserves that.
A few facts:
1) This is the first Circus Devils LP for which Todd Tobias made all of the music. Brother Tim stepped away for a few albums.
2) Before anything was recorded specifically for this record, Robert Pollard already had a title in mind for it, which he shared with Tobias. The title was Bird Maggot.
From there, Tobias made music that leaned into ugliness and outsider vibes because that’s what you do with a thing called Bird Maggot. As always, Tobias keeps things tight and under control. Everything is intentional. You’ll find no “jamming” here, only twenty-three short tracks with a distinct idea inside of each one. Still, to an unsympathetic listener, it will come off as a lot of chaos and bad trips, queasy rhythms and plotless nightmares. Meanwhile, Pollard’s vocal contributions aren’t any more friendly. He’s as much a slam poet, a carnival barker, and an escaped mental patient as he is a rock singer here. His words feel at first like free-association blurts from deep in his notebooks.
If you’re hungry for a pop song or a stadium rocker, Five will starve you. Some traditionally pretty moments and hooks make it onto this slim, busy LP, but they’re brief and mostly aired out in the second half.
As a whole, Five has the same strange energy as a classic midnight movie. It almost WANTS half of the audience to walk out in disgust or confusion. It puts no effort into being liked. It’s irrational and slimy and full of abstractions. Some will abandon it after one or two listens, but the right crowd will stick around and next thing you know it’s alternating weekends at the Rialto with El Topo.
All great oddball works invite crackpot theories and here’s mine about Five:
I think most of its songs are about animals and other non-human lifeforms, such as insects, bacteria, and (ha!) rock critics. Many of the songs are from unfathomable, instinct-driven perspectives. The point of it is the same point as all Circus Devils music, which is to deal in the exotic (or alternately, take the mundane and make it exotic). Heard that way, Todd Tobias’s music here is all the more enthralling because it manages to sound not-human. It doesn’t move like people do. It slithers and crawls and catches flies with its tongue.
It’s like a whole LP of that shot in Blue Velvet where the camera looks down from sunny suburbia and focuses deep into the grass where insects teem. (I wonder if Pollard changed his mind about Bird Maggot as a title because it made the theme too obvious.)
The first side is full of dirt, shadows, hisses, screeches, and bug bites.
After an ethereal curtain-opener (“The Bending Sea”), things get going on “Look Between What’s Goin’ On”. The music is abrasive right away and my take on Pollard’s lyrics is that they’re from a mother creature demonstrating survival skills to her babies. Anticipate predators. Detect prey. Listen to your senses. Listen to the earth. “Look between what’s goin’ on.”
Our movie camera doesn’t pan too far away from that scene for “Just Touch Them”, which hits us with more fetching Tobias racket and a song that I think is either from a parasite, such as a mosquito or a virus, or even a pollinating bee. The “sunfed girls and boys” could be people or they could be flowers. “Just touch them”. Our narrator needs to do it.
Other highlights include “Strain”, which sounds like Martians impersonating The B-52’s and features the memorable lyric “Let’s leap so much/ And now be everywhere/ Let’s fly/ I wanna do a pig’s eye”. It leads us into the chaos of “Animal Motel” and a set of lyrics that mention “Rams/ Spider monkeys/ Hair wolf colors/ Shih-tzus and lizards”. Pollard is an actor in a scene here riding along a demented tribal thump. It closes with him insisting over and over “It’s not me/ It’s the bee”. I believe him, though I can be swayed.
“Future for Germs” is almost a pop song. It could be a Sesame Street singalong that teaches kids about bacteria and how it’s everywhere. It’s living on you right now, folks. “Tiny jeweled eyes love you”.
To contrast the previous song, side 1 closes with three bizarros from Saturn’s furthest moon, with “We Taught Them Rock ‘n’ Roll” being the biggest test for the listener. It plays like a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey in which primitive apes discover guitars instead of an eerie monolith. I think it’s funny.
Side 2 is less foggy and it even rocks sometimes. Or at least there are likable beacons in the swamp such as the minute-long “Eyes Reload”, which brings a whiff of the Devo influence that’s vital to the Tobias-Pollard collaboration, and “Dolphins of Color”, a mystical layer of fog that stands as one of the greatest Circus Devils tracks.
My favorite moment of sequencing on the whole album is the one-two punch of the album’s prettiest song, “Her Noise”, and its meanest rocker, “In the Mood”. One is sweet nectar, the other is a rush of violence (with great, intentionally “bad” feedback-filled production). Like everything here, neither sounds quite human. Incidentally, I think that both songs are about mating. I don’t know WHAT’S mating exactly–caterpillars, sloths, lobsters–but “her noise” is out there and something’s “in the mood”.
The track that REALLY makes Five great though is “The Word Business”. It’s not the best song the on the LP, but it is the best joke. If my theory about this record’s creature concept holds any water, then “The Word Business” is a classic insult. It’s a track that examines the motivations and methods of a particularly odd wildlife specimen: the rock critic.
Pollard’s character is a burnout. This strange biped with opposable thumbs once wanted to be a serious writer, but now he pays the bills taking potshots at local bands with a drink next to his keyboard and a hole in his soul. Or as Pollard puts it, “Biographer, poet, novelist, and hack/ At the bottom of the fifth in a brown paper sack/ Used to be somebody, not coming back/ To the word business”.
“The Word Business” is not only the most straightforward set of lyrics on Five, but they’re some of the most straightforward lyrics that Pollard has ever put out on a record. That alone makes it weird enough for a Circus Devils album.
My favorite from the home stretch is “You Take the Lead”. The music is all warm sun and the words are, I think, from the POV of a pack animal. How do you live? How do you eat? How do you know what to do in the morning? Follow the leader.
The closing credits roll against the dramatic synthscape of “The Other Heart”. Now it’s time to go stand on the sidewalk and talk about what the hell just happened. Much of this record is still mysterious to me and I’ve been listening to it for eighteen years. I bet there are other interpretations out there. I hope so, at least.
We’re all going to see things differently in the dark.