Psycho and The Birds
Check Your Zoo
The Fading Captain Series, 2006
I wish I had great memories to share of cruising to Mel’s Drive-In with my buddies in a Chevy Impala on the last day of summer vacation while Wolfman Jack unleashed new Psycho and the Birds tracks on the radio all night.
The truth is though that I barely remember playing this record when it came out. I bought it, spun it, filed it, and forgot it.
That’s not because it’s bad. No, it’s a vital artifact of the crazy things that can happen when Robert Pollard and Todd Tobias get together. Check Your Zoo rocks, slips into pretty art-rock drama, and closes with some of the best out-to-lunch trippy clatter on a Pollard record from its year. I didn’t hear that at that time, but I hear it now–and it’s important that we have it.
In July 2006, I had a traffic jam of new Robert Pollard records in my head.
I couldn’t have passed a quiz about Suitcase 2 from way back in the fall of 2005. Maybe still couldn’t, even though I wrote 1,800 words about it. It’s massive.
From a Compound Eye, which came out later in January, continued to get turntable time for me in the summer. I liked it but I needed space to appreciate how it all hung together. Side 4 was misty territory to me for a while.
Pollard’s three albums that came out in May were mostly cryptic whispers when they were new. Of that group, The Takeovers offered me the most immediate high. The Keene Brothers LP was clearly great, but I felt that I should save it for later, like an expensive bottle of wine that I got as a gift. It needed to be savored. The Psycho and the Birds record was baffling, but I trusted it to mean something somewhere down the line.
Two months after that, a new EP. More confusion from Psycho and the Birds, this time in 7″ form, perfect for slipping through the cracks.
Robert Pollard doesn’t stop. Nor should he. It’s the top thing that earns him criticism and he’s never listened to it, bless him.
It’s okay to fall behind. These records are for the ages, not tied to any trends of their day. They’re always there waiting. If you couldn’t dig Check Your Zoo in July of 2006, you can always drop in at another time.
May of 2025 is good. Nineteen years later. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Opening track “Glorified Ushers” tastes like power pop, but it could also pass for an old Who demo. It explodes in that way. Meanwhile, don’t expect to understand a single thing that Pollard sings into his boombox. Even he doesn’t know what he’s saying. If it sounds like he’s mumbling, that’s because he’s mumbling. He’s got a melody, but no words. And yes, that’s weird, but you won’t get far into Pollard’s music if you don’t like weird.
He wanted us to hear it anyway, with Todd Tobias giving it body and dimension and synthesizers toward the end that sound like something from an old game show. I love it.
I can’t stress enough that in Psycho and the Birds, Todd Tobias doesn’t merely provide “backing music”. No, he’s doing what a film score composer does. He takes a raw thing, a lo-fi demo from Pollard, and gives it definition and power. He gives it periods, commas, and exclamation points. He gives it drama, comedy, horror, and sci-fi.
It’s fitting that the Psycho and the Birds project was named after Hitchcock. I saw some young hooligan in a movie discussion on Facebook once confess that he wasn’t familiar with any Hitchcock movies “except for Psycho and The Birds” and it made me smile.
Meanwhile, I can’t think of any Todd Tobias music right now that reminds me of Bernard Hermann, Hitchcock’s go-to composer in his heyday, but I can think of plenty that remind me of Devo, a major influence on both Tobias and Pollard.
Devo were new wave, art-rock, and a berserk interpretation of the mid-1970s Ohio landscape that resonated all over the world, but they may have hit even harder the closer you get to Akron.
All I know is that if I were to teach a class about Robert Pollard music (or Todd Tobias music), we’d need to devote a day to dissecting Devo. They’re so important to all of this.
We might also play this EP’s second track, “You’re So New Wave”. Its herk-and-jerk and screaming synths sound like a perfect product of de-evolution, to me. It rules.
“His Master’s Reaction” goes in a completely different direction. It dives deeper into the 1970s. It sounds like a quiet section of a rock opera, which it would soon become when Pollard and Tobias would remake it as a section of the epic track “Cats Love a Parade” on the upcoming Silverfish Trivia EP.
“Organic Comes On” might be the single. It hangs out like a Rolling Stones outtake. It has a bluesy heart, but also a melody. Not many will really hear it, but those who do will care.
My favorite tracks are the last two.
“Nothing the Best” has a title that sounds like a typo and is an instrumental that comes off like the weird, weathered B-side from a psychedelic band who put everything they had onto the “plug side”. The drums are the “singer” and he’s one crazy poet.
“Do Not Devastate” is pretty devastating. It’s the noisy blues song from Pollard and Tobias that I never knew I needed. Listen to it fall apart right in front of you.
Why has rock music lasted so long? Because rock music is the best music we’ve come up with for everything going wrong and everything going right at the exact same time. It’s the style of music where everything can be fucked up and somebody hit the wrong button on the tape machine and it still sounds amazing. It’s the place for weird decisions and left turns. It nurtures the kind of sensibility that allows a record like Check Your Zoo to exist at all, whether we notice it or not.