Robert Pollard-Mania! #103: FROM A COMPOUND EYE

Robert Pollard
From a Compound Eye
2006, Merge Records

I used to think that the kick of a double album was that it simply meant more music to enjoy, but no, that’s not it.

The secret of the best ones is that they’re all uniquely haunted.

Blonde on Blonde, The White Album, Exile on Main St., From a Compound Eye.

None of those were just another day at the office. Some unusual force made an epic absolutely necessary.

Bob Dylan was frustrated. Long sessions in New York yielded only one track that he deemed worthy. Eventually he got convinced to start over with a new group of players in Nashville, where everything came together in a series of white-hot all-night recording marathons. When it was time to go, he had a pile of gold, including one essential cut that was long enough to fill a whole LP side. There was no way that Blonde on Blonde could be a regular record. We needed to know what went down in Nashville and Dylan needed to take us on a journey.

The Beatles got back from India and were splintering apart. Each songwriter was on his own trip and the others were his backing band. The White Album is a batch of solo records crammed together. The songs are supposed to clash. Maybe only a fragmented group would or could make something like it and no mere single LP could paint the picture of how much this band, and their relationship with each other, had changed.

The Rolling Stones made dirty rock ‘n’ roll in what was probably a beautiful villa in the south of France. They were fleeing England’s tax laws and also brought along their producer, some recording equipment, a bunch of friends, and a mountain of drugs. Their music is a poisonous flower grown from decadence. The double length of Exile on Main St. gives you space to imagine that you’ve dropped in on the party, as well as appreciate how the Jagger-Richards craft manages to shine through.

Robert Pollard was a man starting a new era in his life and art. While Half Smiles of the Decomposed is the “final” Guided by Voices album, From a Compound Eye is the secret other half of the story. It was completed in mid-2004, before GBV even started their farewell tour, and if you turn it up loud enough you can all but hear Pollard’s will to upend everything snap into place over twenty-six songs. It’s a double-record set because Eye needs to be many different things at once: a new beginning, a climax, a summary, and an argument to his audience, and maybe even to himself, that this is the right move.

It’s Pollard’s best record of 2006, a contender for his most essential solo release, an explosion of many of his songwriting preoccupations, and is one of the top albums in the stack for a long walk or some serious headphone time laying back with your eyes closed.

One thing that makes it special is that, of the seventeen solo LPs that Pollard made with Todd Tobias, this is among the few for which the two men worked together in the same room. Bob’s warm, melodic rhythm guitar is a constant presence. Meanwhile, with the exception of a few contributions from Chris Sheehan and Scott Bennett, Todd handles everything else and something about the mood made his arrangements extra playful and adventurous.

See the bonkers “The Right Thing” on side one. It’s a pop wonder that Pollard and Tobias attack with crazy ideas. Their first act of vandalism happens in the intro, which is over a full minute of the song’s ragged solo boombox demo. When the track eventually spreads its wings and becomes a full-bodied powerhouse, it does so to the weird plunk of a toy drum that keeps time for the whole rest of the song. And how do they end this madness? A Jew’s harp onslaught makes sense to me, I guess. “The Right Thing” pulls off its own variation on an old Guided by Voices trick, which is to hit hard via bizarre production. It goes for a big vision, but through low-budget methods. It’s all raw creativity. Scotch tape and scissors. Two cool guys in a room.

Freedom and experimentation rule here and it’s always in service of the song. Pollard’s disinterest in laborious studio craft is well-known. Left to his own devices, he will never make The Wall or Loveless. He’s not going to spend months tweaking guitar tones and laying down umpteenth takes. He’s just not. That’s not how his head works.

What some call “impatience” though (or “laziness” if they don’t like him), I hear as a healthy taste for immediacy. Pollard has an ear for first-take energy. He sees nothing wrong with recording a whole album in less time than it takes the post office to deliver it to me. This sensibility grounds much of his music in punk even when it’s sometimes more prog on surface.

That’s the spirit of From a Compound Eye. It’s ambitious, but also raw and manic. It’s an epic made by crazy artists who’ve both been around the block, but they’ve never done something quite like THIS before and they’ll try anything.

The album follows a personal muse. I went back and re-listened to a stack of 1960s-70s rock double LPs. The Who, Genesis, Jimi Hendrix, The Bee Gees, Yes, Jesus Christ Superstar. I came away with two observations:

1. Most of the classics begin bombastically. English bands, in particular, like to go with the theatre of it, sometimes opening with a busy overture.

2. Most of these records have a first side that’s dedicated to building a mood. This is OPERA. This is an epic film. This is an acid trip. This is something bigger than a mere rock album.

From a Compound Eye does neither of those things.

It begins quietly.

Opening track “Gold” is a sunrise (or is it a sunset?) that’s pensive and beautiful and also grizzled. The lyrics sketch out images of gold prospectors, but it could be a metaphor for any pursuit, whether it’s searching for shiny rocks or making art. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes not, but it’s the only way that some know how to live.

From there, side one zig-zags in all directions. Pollard’s sequencing is jagged and hooked on friction and stops just short of chaos. It’s how his songs sound best. The damaged synth-pop of track 2, “Field Jacket Blues”, is nothing like “Gold”. The hummable showtune-like appeal of track 3, “Dancing Girls and Dancing Men” goes somewhere else as well. “The Right Thing” barges in boldly in between two soft melodies.

Pop. Prog. Psych. Punk. Robert Pollard’s “four P’s” of great rock are all here in some form. They interrupt each other and exhaust themselves, coming and going and then coming back.

Side two does it all over again except that it begins big and loud. “The Numbered Head” is one those guitar-heavy groovers that often showed up toward the end of side one on recent Guided by Voices LPs, but through the different lens of a double album it sounds coolest as the start of a side. Other highlights include the post-punk workout of “Kick Me and Cancel” and the surging beauty of “Other Dogs Remain”, which also brings powerful lyrics about the nature of fate. “Kensington Cradle”, the album’s lone Pollard-Tobias co-writing credit, represents unglued moody weirdness, which is an essential color in the Pollard kaleidoscope. It’s also here to do the set-up job for “Love is Stronger Than Witchcraft”, Pollard’s pick for the single.

That’s the end of side two and I INSIST that you get into the LP sides here. It’s important. If you’re listening on CD or streaming, that can still work. Look up the side breaks and make a mental note.

From a Compound Eye is a double album in the 1969 sense, which means that it’s FOUR SIDES of music. It’s not merely a record that runs long. A double album is a design choice. It’s FOUR curtains that open and FOUR curtains that close and each side is a piece of sequencing as careful as the acts of a play or the chapters of a book. If you love the record, you probably even have a favorite side.

Side three is my favorite. It has “Conqueror of the Moon”, a mighty return to the style of “Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox” in that it’s a grand suite of ideas, but presented with such power that one might not notice at first that the song is completely nuts (“The Spanish Hammer” from Motel of Fools is a suite from a few years earlier and its stitched-together production makes a point of showing the seams and drawing attention to what it is, so I distinguish it from this). It shares space with greats such as “I Surround You Naked”, a power pop melody and a promise of honesty in a relationship from a man who’s seen how destructive the opposite can be (and that he has been a part of the problem), and “Blessed in an Open Head”, expert psych that Pollard claims he wrote when he was a kid in the 1960s, so don’t call it retro.

By side four, it’s time to get ready to go home, but first there must be one last rocker (“Denied”), one last pop song (“I’m a Strong Lion”), one last soft pillow (“Payment for the Babies”), and a few more blasts of prog-inspired drama all laid out with the same care and contrast and craziness of the rest.

From a Compound Eye is not a concept album, but it can be if you’re real liberal with your definition. See the title.

Compound eyes are a common trait of insects and some sea creatures. Their eyes are many microscopic eyes that perceive every little change around them from multiple directions. That’s why it’s hard to swat a fly. They sense everything and they react instantly.

Pollard named his album after that to say that this is a widescreen impression of his world and the things that he thinks about and cares about. It draws freely from his influences and has no single mood or focus. In interviews, Pollard frequently explained that the songs here are a mix of new and old. He and Todd Tobias sometimes rework unheard relics from deep in his archives, so this compound eye also sees into the past.

Grand finale “Recovering” rolls the closing credits and it’s one of the best songs. Had From a Compound Eye been as big as Pollard thought it could be, it might have become another “Don’t Stop Now”, a new standard farewell for the live show. “Tomorrow will be/ Let today still be now” is a great line for raising your fist to at the end of` a sweaty night of noise and Pollard delivers it with Roger Daltrey power.

But the song is not about raising your fist. It’s about what happens next. It’s about recovering.

Life is about recovery. There are so many things that we recover from. We recover from bad times and from good times (ever been hungover from too much fun the night before?). Bouncing back is the most interesting thing that human beings do. And we’re always being tested. And it’s often our own goddamn fault.

As I write this, I’ll be seeing Guided by Voices live soon. Dallas, Texas, October 2024. There’s a rumor that this is the final tour and this is the last date. Robert Pollard is about to turn 67 and I can believe that he’s done with crossing the country in a van. Do I think that this is the last show ever? Can’t say. No comment. I know nothing. Also, you never know what life will bring.

Meanwhile, I have responsibilities the next day and I just turned 48 and I intend to spend this show chilling out. I will drink lightly and find a place to sit. I’ve got a bad knee so I won’t even attempt to pogo like I used to do.

I will be thinking about recovery. 

Bob Dylan ended his double album masterpiece with an eleven-minute love song. The Beatles ended their double album with a lushly orchestrated joke. The Rolling Stones ended their epic by teasing death in a way that only brash young men would do.

They’re all great moments, but I relate more these days to Robert Pollard’s ending.

Recovering.

I do it all of the time and if that’s the place where Pollard decides to end twenty-six songs of left turns and crazed electricity, well, that makes perfect sense to me.

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