Robert Pollard
Normal Happiness
2006, Merge Records
Double albums are peachy keen and all, but their follow-ups are also fun to think about.
Or what does the artist do AFTER they’ve made an epic? This is a vulnerable place and where they go is revealing.
Some authors and filmmakers get into a groove of thinking in grand terms every time. See Marcel Proust or David Lean. There’s nothing wrong with that, but rock music, rooted in blues, folk, and jukebox 45s, seems to come with a natural gravitational pull back down to Earth after a big statement.
There are many paths to take. Here are a few that come up a lot:
1. THE STRIP DOWN
The double album was the exhaustion of something and now we’re starting over. Simpler sounds dominate and maybe even a reinterpretation of roots and early influences. This is Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, The Beatles’ Let It Be (recorded shortly after The White Album, though its release was held back for a bit), and Frank Black’s The Cult of Ray.
2. THE WEIRDING UP
When the double album is an acclaimed hit, some artists react by taking further risks. Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants is a double album itself that’s mostly a spacey instrumental film score. Then there’s Todd Rundgren’s great A Wizard, A True Star, on which he rejects the stardom that beckoned after a couple of high-charting singles in favor of becoming an unpredictable oddball.
(While I’m here, fans of 90s Guided by Voices might get a kick out of A Wizard, A True Star. Pollard has never cited it as an influence, as far as I know, but its nineteen tracks on a ruthlessly groove-crammed single LP hold up as a pre-punk prototype of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. It’s abundant madness with a pop sensibility. If you’re deep enough into Pollard’s music that you’re reading this and you haven’t heard A Wizard, A True Star, do yourself a favor.)
3. THE NEW DAY RISING
Here, the underground band from a scene that’s sensitive to compromise and selling out makes a double record set that boldly reveals ambition. Their next release wastes no time moving forward, for better or worse. Sonic Youth went major label after Daydream Nation because that was how this trajectory went at the time. Husker Du followed up Zen Arcade with a record that was a newly sharpened blade and more melodic than ever. They still weren’t ready to mingle with the mainstream of the mid-1980s (or interested in that), but they were closer than before.
4. THE ICARUS MANEUVER
Here the artist goes even bigger and this shit is dangerous. This tends to not work out. The ghost of Buddy Holly disapproves and he puts a curse on the whole affair. Sandinista! by The Clash has its fans, but is just as often used as the punchline to observations about a band crawling up their own ass. And despite Pete Townsend’s best efforts to make Lifehouse a multimedia experience that topped Tommy, it drove him to the edge and nearly destroyed The Who. His compromise, Who’s Next, ended up one of the best rock albums of all-time, but there’s a lot of blood on the floor leading up to it.
That’s only scratching the surface. I could go on, but we’ve got a Robert Pollard solo LP to talk about.
Where does Normal Happiness fit into this? It’s complicated, but my take starts here: It’s the conclusion to a trilogy in which Pollard re-introduces us to Todd Tobias.
We’ve met Tobias before. Maybe you loved his often nightmarish music for Circus Devils or maybe you hated it, but I think that Pollard heard worlds in it (as I did) and was wowed enough to work with him a lot more. By 2006, Guided by Voices were finished. The solo albums were Pollard’s new main thing and Todd Tobias was the new “band”. Their first three albums together needed to be different from each other because that’s the most interesting way to begin a new era.
How do you do that? How about a run through Pollard’s famous “Four P’s”? Makes sense to me.
Fiction Man is both punk and psychedelic. A beautiful combination. It’s rough and punchy and always up for a disorienting turn. The weirdest song you’ve heard all day and the prettiest sit next to each other.
From a Compound Eye is prog. No, it’s not prog all of the way. It colors outside the lines wildly. It’s not Tales from Topographic Oceans, but it is progressive in that it climbs a mountain. Its four sides are carefully arranged to feel epic and mystical. Also, the production moves up a few notches while still feeling homemade. The beautifully bashed-out 16mm film sound of Fiction Man is upgraded to an equally beautiful widescreen 35mm. We can hear deeper into it.
Normal Happiness deals with what’s left, which is pop, specifically from influences that span the 1960s to the power pop of the 1970s as reflected in a cracked mirror. The songs and sequencing choices lean into hooks and Todd Tobias reaches for the synthesizer only when it’s absolutely necessary, but weirdness, shadows, and ghosts still happen around every corner. It’s the Pollard way.
Opening track “Accidental Texas Who” is all jittery riffs and classic frustration. It sets up much of what follows, which are pop songs without a chorus. Or maybe they build up to a chorus-like catharsis and then end right there.
For more of that, see “Get a Faceful”, “Towers and Landslides”, and “I Feel Gone Again”, the triple-feature of quickies that conclude side 1. The longest of them is two minutes and three seconds. The shortest is a mere one minute and thirteen. When they’re over, I never feel like I’ve heard fragments or blips. My brain perceives weight and space in them. In Robert Pollard’s music, a lot can happen in a minute-and-a-half and it happens so naturally.
Most of Normal Happiness isn’t “perfect pop” in the sense of neat verse-chorus-verse and polished production. No, it’s eccentric pop from a crazy man and if you don’t like that, I don’t know what you’re doing here.
In the summer-kissed “Boxing About”, Pollard sings verses such as “Whore memories have taken/ The vaccinations from your box/ From pockets of no stoppage/The madness of the factories/The spacing of the rocks” like Paul McCartney would have sung a love song in 1965.
It’s almost as odd as “Serious Birdwoman (You Turn Me On)”, in which Pollard is a soul singer from Mars. This Serious Birdwoman has set his pants on fire. You can hear the longing in the song’s trilling verses. I’m not sure that the human vocal tract is capable of shaping those parts in a slick way. They force a vulnerable, damaged performance. Tobias had Pollard stand on the other side of the room from the mic for this song, which accounts for the distant sound. It’s Pollard’s roughest singing performance on the record and it’s my favorite of his singing performances on the record.
“Rhoda Rhoda” is the closest thing here to a “hit”. It contrasts much of the album’s aversion to choruses by exploding instantly into its hook on a “Glad Girls” level and then it won’t let go of it. I don’t know what inspired this great song, but it makes me think of old photo albums. Pictures of your mother. You’re a baby. The elders in your life are young and excited. Or at least they look that way in old photos. “The very visual days past of babies and good times”. I know exactly what that means and it deserves an anthem and Pollard brings it.
It’s a highlight of side 2, where Normal Happiness begins taking sharper left turns and a fog rolls in. Not every song on an LP should be a single. Pollard paces the floor over album sequencing and he knows that the best thing you can do for a pop song sometimes is set it up and then come down from it.
“Rhoda Rhoda” is set up by the twisted herk-and-jerk of “Gasoline Ragtime”, a track that makes use of Todd Tobias’s ear for adventurous sonics, as well as the Devo influence that both men share.
The comedown is “Give Up the Grape”, which is on the short list of Pollard songs that take a pessimistic view of drinking. It’s also one of the most Cheap Trick-sounding tracks in the Pollard catalog, but I’m talking about the dark, threatening side of Rick Nielsen and co., where they rocked out with songs about serial killers and suicide.
My sleeper favorite track on side 2 is “Join the Eagles”, which is pure aural mist. Pollard and Tobias have somehow seen into my weird, private recurring dreams. That’s what it sounds like, at least.
They’re those dreams where I’m in my childhood home and yet I’m my current age, so I don’t belong there anymore (and my mother is long dead so I have no current connection to that house), but it’s still home to me. That said, it’s not comforting. There’s a disturbance in the air. It’s like I can sense an apocalypse coming soon, but I don’t know exactly what it is. Maybe this “apocalypse” is simply getting older and forgetting.
Pollard closes up shop with “Full Sun (Dig the Slowness)”, which sounds like a fragment from a lost Genesis demo circa 1973.
Normal Happiness is guitar pop that doesn’t always do what Big Star would do. It doesn’t walk a straight line, but neither does any other Pollard record. It bows down to no other band’s legacy nor sticks to the rules of any style. Its only god is Melody and Pollard serves her in his own way.
The album is a Strip Down, but it’s also a Weirding Up because that’s what happens when Pollard tries to keep things “simple” and under three minutes. His strange heart is revealed.
Does he have it in him to make a perfect power pop album? Probably, but as he closed in on age 50, I don’t think that Pollard saw any sense in that. Life is short and it’s best spent making things that only you would ever make.
In October of 2006, if you bought Normal Happiness straight from Merge Records or from a cool indie store, you got a bonus live CD called Moon.
The date is June 24, 2006. The place is the US Bank Arena in Cincinnati, Ohio. Robert Pollard is opening for Pearl Jam, who are recording every gig on their tour because they’re in a phase where they release live albums of every show that they play. It’s a reaction to internet piracy, I guess. I’m not a Pearl Jam fan so I’ll leave that whole thing alone, but they were nice enough to allow Pollard to use their gear to record his sets and that’s how we have this crunchy and crystal-clear document of a Pollard show during this weird period.
The band are Tommy Keene, Jason Narducy, Dave Phillips, and Jon Wurster and they provide firm muscle for Pollard’s new solo venture in which the new shit was all that mattered. Only one old Guided by Voices song (“Game of Pricks”) makes the cut in a set that’s all about Pollard’s latest work.
Todd Tobias is not in the live band, who are copying his arrangements. Todd Tobias is a mystery man figuring out the NEXT Pollard record, or doing some other strange thing, at home in the shadows.
Among the revelations here are how the band perform “The Right Thing” (from From a Compound Eye) as close as they can get to the album version, complete with the stripped-down intro.
Meanwhile, this is the first tour that Pollard has performed with a keyboard on stage. Tommy Keene doesn’t always play it, but when he does it’s to turn the likes of “Dolphins of Color” and “Conqueror of the Moon” into some real super sounds of the 70s.