Psycho and The Birds
All That is Holy
2006, The Fading Captain Series
I wouldn’t recommend All That is Holy as anyone’s first Pollard record, or even their tenth or their twentieth. I can say from experience though that if it’s your 106th, you might be weird enough at that point to get along with it.
The collaboration era between Robert Pollard and Todd Tobias is deep, deep waters. There should be a book about this period alone. Counting only the ones for which Tobias contributes writing, arrangements, or one-man-band work, it’s about three dozen LPs that sometimes have nothing in common on the surface except for that weird, free Ohio energy that those of us who know our Devo from our Dead Boys can hear. It’s music from a proud ancestry, generations in the making. The soot from old steel mills passed down.
They’re a pair of eccentrics who understood to not “typecast” the other. Excitement happens in the left turn. I imagine that these two were constantly surprised by what the other did with his work.
In Circus Devils, the music by Todd and Tim Tobias is often unlike anything else in Pollard’s discography.
On the seventeen solo records that he made with Todd Tobias, Pollard hands over songs that don’t always call for a Circus Devils-style treatment. He wants to hear how Tobias handles other sounds. He wants to ask Dr. Moreau to go on Sesame Street and explain the science behind flowers and rain.
Then there’s Psycho and The Birds, a further twist on the Pollard-Tobias method.
Every track starts with a lo-fi sketch of a song by Robert Pollard. At this stage, he sometimes doesn’t have complete lyrics. All he’s got are some acoustic guitar chords and hints of words that form a melody that he slurs into his old boombox, a blank cassette getting magnetically massaged inside.
From there, Todd Tobias arranges and performs a whole guitar-bass-drums-keyboards circus around it, both adding definition to Pollard’s idea and submerging it in sound. The original vocal, always left as-is, sounds like a ghost.
Not everyone will be into it and Pollard knows that. “File Under: Hard-on Listener”, says the front cover.
In May 2006 All That is Holy was one of three new albums released on the same day and was the ugly duckling of the batch. If you bought all of them, you were there for Pollard and this album is the one of the trio that treats him like a supporting actor. Pollard had to sneak out something WEIRD to us in all of the excitement and this is it.
The star here is Todd Tobias, whose work is a hallucinatory trip back to the late 70s, early 80s. He keeps the distortion to a minimum. You can hear picks hit strings. You can hear vivid bass. You can hear plenty of dusty old garage rock and post-punk coming alive again. You can also hear a guy who holds back when necessary, respects the song.
Todd Tobias is the great lost film score composer of our time. I almost want to make a movie myself, just so I can hire him to make the music. I’ve got a few terrible ideas. Maybe Todd could improve them. Maybe the idiotic scenes in my head just need some angular guitar work and creepy bass lines happening beneath to sell them as believable. I’ve heard what he does with Robert Pollard’s toss-offs and maybe Todd Tobias could help improve mine.
Crazier things have happened, like this album.
As for Robert Pollard, usually his voice and lyrics guide you through his records. but that doesn’t apply here. He’s always there, but Todd is much louder. Pollard brings melody and feelings, but he’s in the shadows. There’s no figuring out what he’s saying because very often he’s not saying anything. At least not in words.
You listen to this differently than you listen to most Pollard records and maybe it’s hard on the listener, but Pollard does give you a breadcrumb trail to follow if you’re interested.
Look at the title.
Look at the song titles. “Suffer the Son”, “Blood Witness”, “Father is Good”, “Jesus the Clockwork”.
Look at the cover. On close inspection, it’s a mundane urban building, but the angle makes it look like something ancient.
My crackpot theory:
This is an album about religious mystery and Pollard is either the voice of God or the voice of someone trying to figure out God. He’s inscrutable. Words can’t explain Him.
Every time I read the Bible, I think about how these words on the page have gone through so many translations before they reached my hands. I don’t know what to think about them. I don’t know what to believe. I was raised to believe in God so it’s always there in me no matter what. It’s a puzzle that I will spend my life sifting through. If there is a God maybe he’s a muted, lo-fi voice in these pages. Maybe he isn’t something that’s explained in words at all, but a feeling.
Maybe God is rain. God is air. God is the grass. God is the rabbits who are everywhere in my neighborhood when I go on my nightly walks, scattering every which way as I pass by, so pretty and funny. I love those rabbits so much.
Maybe God is just the understanding that to be human is to be humble. How can anyone hate anyone else when we’re all such tiny dust mites in the grand scheme of things? Look up at the sky and the vastness of what’s up there is staggering.
I think about it all of the time, but I still don’t know what to say about it. I will never feel that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to the Big Questions.
Maybe there are no words to explain all that is holy and some stinging guitar chords and keyboards riffs are as close as we’re going to get.