The Takeovers
Turn to Red
2006, The Fading Captain Series
I recommend making bold statements sometimes. I’ve heard that it’s good for your circulation.
My bold statement of the day is that Robert Pollard fans have more FUN than any other fans in rock music. What sets Pollard fandom apart is that it’s long-sustained fun. I’ve been on this ride for thirty years now and it’s still going.
Now I’m not saying that those of us who know our Mars Classroom from our Elephant Jokes are guaranteed to throw the craziest parties or be the most enthusiastic whitewater rafters, but when it comes to having over 100 albums of music to explore and re-explore as we follow an eccentric genius who won’t take a year off and is determined to use rock music to draw his own step-by-step map of the insights and calamities of aging, I think that us Pollard freaks have it pretty good. Things are always happening. We never get radio silence.
Had my formative influences been a little different, maybe I’d be a Juggalo today and I’d have no idea who Robert Pollard is and I’m glad that didn’t happen.
I consider myself lucky that my tastes and my life mutated in just the right way that I was able to appreciate GBV’s lo-fi in the mid-90s, go with the band’s changes afterward, cling to the solo albums and side projects, see my world expand from the prog influences, get hit hard by the Circus Devils on first listen, and still feel that I’m following an epic story decades later.
The latest Guided by Voices LP, as of this writing in 2025, Universe Room, is among the most mysterious things ever released under the name with not one pop single in its seventeen tracks of freeform post-punk and prog puzzle pieces. The songs are lean, but densely packed and it’s a foggy first listen. It doesn’t beg you to like it and not everyone will, but it leaves cracks in the earth that will expand over time. We’ve barely started to unpack this uniquely weird period of Pollard’s music, where he’s fonder than ever of writing songs that shirk laws of shape and structure. Verse-chorus-verse is rare. Left turns rule.
Pollard writes songs like an old man these days, and I mean that in the sense that he’s checked out of every game there is in music beyond pleasing his own tastes. Nostalgia remains a big part of his work, but it’s become dreamier than ever. Other bands, old and new, even his own, are no longer competition. If he wrote “Game of Pricks” today, it might be a minute or two longer and flower into a whole other melody in that extra time (not saying that it would be better or not, an irrelevant concern to Pollard omnivores such as myself). Meanwhile, he’s mostly shed the side collaborations and trusts one reliable, creative band of players to arrange and interpret his latest madness.
Robert Pollard has always been nuts, though. He’s always doing things “wrong”, but making it sound great. Weirdness is the only thing that I’ve come to expect from him over three decades and it’s what I’ve always gotten. Bold statements. Good for the arteries.
Take May of 2006 when he put out three albums in one day.
Talk about fun. That was amazing. I don’t remember what the weather was like when I got three new Pollards in the mail, but in my imagination it was perfect.
The May 2006 albums are all different from each other. They’re all made with different collaborators and fly in different directions and I’m happy that I’m crazy enough to appreciate them all. Grouped together and in the sequence of their Fading Captain Series catalog numbers, they remind me of an oddball, but great, triple-bill that you might catch at a rock club on a Tuesday night.
Lush pop maestros The Keene Brothers play last. People think that they’re going to be famous. Arty weirdos Psycho and the Birds get the middle slot. Maybe they know somebody. Kicking off the shindig is The Takeovers, playing to about eight people, but rocking all of them. They have energy to spare, but they don’t sound young, either. They sound like beat-up equipment and deep record collections. Influences include Flipper, Thin White Rope, The New York Dolls, Pebbles volume whatever, vinyl surface noise, shitty guitars, Guided by Voices.
Chris Slusarenko creates and performs most of the music. He was in Guided by Voices for a brief spell, but I mostly thought of him at this time as the Off Records guy. Pollard was down for all sorts of collaborations for awhile and Slusarenko, who ran his own label, had the idea to go extra weird with it and pair him with unlikely partners. Richard Meltzer. Phantom Tollbooth.
A few years later, Bob finally worked with someone who Slusarenko might have considered the most unlikely collaborator of all. Him.
The music here is great. Slusarenko’s tracks are like a shelf of fascinatingly broken toys. Blinking lights and moving parts, but with pieces missing and caved-in heads. Everything’s weathered.
“Insane/Cool It” sounds like a model of big-riff retro garage rock until the fucked-up solo paints clown make-up on the whole thing. Pollard sings like the guy from The Shadows of Knight, but with screwball words that culminate with a furiously shouted repetition of “Airport 5 is evil inside!” and it’s so funny. Everything about this track is screwed up and hard to relate to the civilian, but nothing cool is for everyone.
If the opening poetry recital, “Do You Get Your Wish?”, didn’t already convince you that this album is totally animal crackers, “Insane/Cool It” seals the deal. And it’s just the beginning.
My favorite track is “Mojo Police”. It makes no goddamn sense and it’s noisy as hell. Its freedom somehow calms my nerves and reminds me that I need to relax my shoulders more often. I’m always tense and I don’t know why, but I think it needs to stop if I want to live to my goal of 225 years old.
Slusarenko’s music in “Mojo Police” freaks out and chills out in the strangest places. It’s loud, except for when it’s quiet. Meanwhile, Pollard uses this chaos as a place to reckon with the end of Guided by Voices in 2004. Its push-and-pull gives him a place reflect on his fears about starting over and reinforce why he needed to do it. Trivia: The line “I used to be quite the senator, Steve” is a reference to Steve Albini’s habit of addressing musicians he worked with as “Senator”.
My second favorite is “Be It Not for the Serpentine Rain Dodger”. Apparently, Chris Slusarenko, that lucky duck, got to dig through Pollard’s old tapes and he found this beautiful pop melody from back in the day (going by Pollard’s voice, this is probably mid to late 80s) that somehow remained unreleased. From there, Slusranenko added a full musical backing, including Dan Peters from Mudhoney on drums, to turn it into a luscious Takeovers song and a new classic.
The third track on my list o’ hits is “Bullfighter’s Cut”, the late-in-the-album cooldown that that not only offers keyboard work, but some very rare trumpet (played by Sam Coomes) on a Pollard recording.
The rest is good, too. There’s no bad seat in this house. “Fairly Blacking Out” is the catchy “emphasis track”. “First Spill is Free” is a gentle one in which Pollard drops an out-of-nowhere nod to “Vietnamese Baby” by The New York Dolls.
“Wig Stomper” is a voicemail sent to Slusarenko of a goofy song that Pollard came up with on the spot, just to make him laugh. I see no problem here. These albums are scrapbooks of a time and place. I love that this got shared.
“Scuffle With Nature” references “Eggs Make Me Sick”, which deep-reading Pollard freaks might remember as one of his earliest songs that he wrote as a kid, though I doubt that young Pollard came up with the whole thing, which addresses the serious issue of period blood and oral sex.
“Sweet Jelly” is a simple collage made by Slusarenko from old Pollard tapes.
“The Public Dance” sets up a big prog moment, but Pollard decided to let it sit as an instrumental and let it escalate all on its own. It’s one more portal to another world on an album full of them.
“Jancy” is another thing that Slusarenko found on an ancient cassette and then added simple drums and a few other audio paint splotches, including a slowed-down kazoo. It was Pollard’s decision to speed up the vocals so that he sounds like a cartoon character on this fine song about brotherhood.
And that’s how you end an album. Weird. Mysterious. Not sure what the hell just happened.
I come away from this record liking Chris Slusarenko a lot. He’s a music freak for sure. Melody matters, but so does noise. Sound itself is a drug whether it’s rocking you, soothing you or confusing you. He’s walked up to a lot of record store counters and replaced a lot of needles. You can hear that in the notes and chords. This “been around the block” sound just works with Pollard’s voice and songwriting tendencies.
I wanted to hear more from him. And we’d get plenty of that in time.
But first, we had two more new Pollard albums to explore this day. We had a lot in front of us to figure out.
Lucky for me, that’s my idea of fun.