Author: Jason

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Frank Black-O-Rama! #6: FRANK BLACK

Frank Black
Frank Black
1993, 4AD/Elektra

In the Pixies, Black Francis wrote fun, memorable songs about surrealism and aliens, but he didn’t get really weird until he flipped his stage name and became rock music’s top science nerd.

Why the change? The break-up of the old band was just that bitter, I guess. He had to wash it off. Treat it like something best forgotten. He wouldn’t even play Pixies songs live for five years.

There was also something punk rock about it in an old school way. It gave off street cred. In their early 80s heyday, the likes of Black Flag and Husker Du played live shows typically dominated by their new stuff even when it wasn’t yet out on a record. Leaning on your past is what tired old rock stars do. Real motherfuckers move forward.

So, on that note, meet Frank Black, 4AD’s newest pop sensation! Hear his hopelessly strange “debut” of brilliant songs that surf on waves of crisp, synthetic sounds. It was also his best and most eccentric work yet at the time.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #68: LIFE STARTS HERE

Airport 5
Life Starts Here
2002, The Fading Captain Series

My guess is that many deep-digging fans of Robert Pollard are White Album people.

It’s the old, dead-horse debate. Did The Beatles’ White Album need to be a 30-track double-LP? Do its detours and excesses hold up? Was it really necessary that we hear “Revolution 9” and “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” and “Wild Honey Pie”?

My answer to those questions is YES, YES, and YES. That’s my favorite Beatles album. It’s crazy and lively and packed with ideas and I would sooner chop off one of my fingers than lose any of it. The frosty clip collage “Revolution 9” is cool as shit. It makes the closing lullaby “Good Night” creepy.  On The White Album, the most famous rock band in the world deconstruct their sound in a fast-paced flurry of genres and the only way to end it is on an apocalyptic note. It’s as good as it gets.

Some disagree. Some would prefer a smoother, more conventional ride. They’ve got a whole list of Lennon-McCartney and Harrison songs that they wish they’d never heard. I think that these people are goofy, but, hey, it’s a big world. There’s room for all kinds.

What I’m trying to say is that Robert Pollard’s music has some of the same appeal and leads to similar division.

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PAIN DON’T HURT: Surviving the Texas Winter Apocalypse of 2021 with ROAD HOUSE

Most of the stereotypes about Texans are just not true.

I only wear my cowboy boots on special occasions such as weddings and barn dance night.

I don’t care that much about football (I only have three Dallas Cowboys tattoos; the fourth one on my neck doesn’t count because my cousin accidentally misspelled it as Dallas Cobwoys).

I’m also opposed to guns, except for in extreme cases, such as when a stranger shows up in town or somebody says that they don’t like Waylon Jennings.

There is ONE stereotype though that I will admit is 100% on the money.

Texas people don’t know shit about winter. Example: me.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #67: THE TROPIC OF NIPPLES EP

Richard Meltzer, Robert Pollard, Smegma & Antler
The Tropic of Nipples EP
2002, Off Records

There’s a charm to music that doesn’t care about being liked. Music that farts right in your face and doesn’t even say “excuse me”.

You can criticize it for being tuneless, I guess, but what does that mean if it doesn’t seek to be tuneful? You can call it trash, but how sharp is your blade when the music is happy to be damaged? You can say that it’s an insult, but how many megatons is your bomb when these sounds are intended to be an affront?

Tropic of Nipples is one of those records. It’s one of those outsider things. It’s proudly ugly, pointedly disheveled and wantonly fucked. A negative review is as much of a recommendation as a positive one. Its twelve tracks (it’s a stretch to call most of them songs) all crammed up on the original 7″ come and go too quickly to enjoy much on their own. They’re parts of a whole, individual scribbles of graffiti on the same brick wall.

Our two vandals are Richard Meltzer and Robert Pollard.

This isn’t really a Robert Pollard record. He’s the co-star. The title is Meltzer’s. Meltzer also gets the first and last tracks on the original release.

Pollard contributes cover art and six tracks (plus two more on the CD), but the real auteur here looks to be Off Records founder Chris Slusarenko.

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The Constant Bleeder Is Clearly Not Serious About Reviewing Anime #6: BUBBLEGUM CRISIS episode 6, “Red Eyes”

In 2020, I learned that dystopia is not for me.

I don’t mean the fictional kind; I’m talking about the real life stuff. I know people who spent their Great Pandemic Lockdown getting their money’s worth from Netflix, watching 900 movies and binging 500 TV shows in between baking bread and updating their social media all about it.

I’m impressed–impressed that they were able to relax. Wish I could do that. Sincerely. I wish that I could’ve untensed my shoulders and plopped on the couch and watched something other than news, doom and conspiracy theories.

Instead, my thoughts went something like this:

Everything could collapse soon and I am not ready, financially, emotionally or in any other sense. This is no time to marathon watch the Fast and Furious movies. I got worryin’ to do!

In retrospect though, a bunch of car chases would have rotted my brain less than the YouTube videos that I was watching.

Now it’s 2021 and I wouldn’t say that I’m any more hopeful than I was six months ago, but fear gets old and you move on.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m still alive and I really want to sit and watch Japanese animation from over thirty years ago about girls in mechanical armor fighting killer robots. When you can concentrate on something like that, you know that you’re okay.

It also helps that this is a pretty good episode.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #66: LIVE AT THE ATHENS TIME CHANGE RIOTS

The Cum Engines (Featuring The Cannot Changes)
Live at the Athens Time Change Riots
2001, F ‘n’ E

By the time this LP came out around the holidays, I believe that Guided by Voices were were officially indie rock again. After two albums, they broke up with TVT Records. I’ve had bigger surprises in life.

For most of the year, Robert Pollard was already talking in the press about his vision for the next GBV album. It was going to lean prog-rock and it was going to be called Heavy River. The title would change a few more times until it finally become Universal Truths and Cycles, but Heavy River was what he was calling it early in 2001 as the spring birds sang (the earliest reference I could find to it still online is this Denver Post article published on March 25, 2001, over a week before Isolation Drills was out).

The not-so-subtle message: He was done chasing hits and it was time to move on and he was ready to do that right NOW. Isolation Drills was new to us, but it was old to him. Even if “Glad Girls” became the new “Losing My Religion”, Heavy River was still the next move.

Before that march forward though came this flashback, GBV’s sixth vinyl-only, bootleg-style live release. The recording was from awhile ago. It was the night of January 22, 2000 at The 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, in the middle of the southeastern US leg of a long tour, with Australia and Japan coming up, and then another month-and-change of scrambling across the US after that. It was the same show from which the Dayton, OH 19-Something-and-5 7″ A-side came.

In a strange, non-linear, collage artist way though, this nearly two-year-old show comes off like a statement of purpose for the band at the time.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #65: SOME DRINKING IMPLIED

Guided by Voices
Some Drinking Implied
2001, MVD Music Video

If you’re under 40 and outside of the US, you probably won’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but back in the 1980s and up to the early 90s, there was an amazing TV show called Night Flight. It came on after midnight on Saturdays and it was three hours of weird short films, music videos and random artifacts from pop culture’s junk pile.

In one night, you might see a Public Image Ltd. interview, an episode of Dynaman, some bizarre Church of the Subgenius short, a World War II-era Daffy Duck cartoon and what felt like about five hundred other things. Whether you were staggering in from an evening out in your cool 80s clothes or a kid like me up late and learning the ways of the night owl way too young, Night Flight was the perfect hallucinatory trip-out. Turn your brain on or off. Either is fine.

It was formative. It twisted me up pretty good. Looking back, I can see what it helped turn me into, which is a culture freak who will watch anything no matter how old or strange or low-budget or tossed aside. (See this site’s film section for the damage wrought.)

It made me the kind of goofball who enjoys the wrecked spectacle of Some Drinking Implied.

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Missing Girls, Texas Rangers, Barflies, Teenagers, and Peter’s Friends: Recent Film Reviews

One thing that I learned about myself during the Great Pandemic of 2020 is that when I’m stressed out, I don’t watch very many movies. When I did put on something, it was usually an old favorite that I’d reviewed before. In fact, three of these films are ones that I’d seen before, but just hadn’t written about. SO, these are the only film reviews that I wrote in 2020. I’m hoping to get back in the swing of things this year.

Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
Lone Wolf McQuade (1983)
Night World (1932)
Pretty in Pink (1986)
Peter’s Friends (1992)

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #64: RINGWORM INTERIORS

Circus Devils
Ringworm Interiors
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Sometimes on the internet, an innocent lamb who’s in the middle of discovering Robert Pollard’s body of work will step forward and ask where they should start with Circus Devils.

It’s a fair question. At fourteen albums released over sixteen years, this collaboration with fellow Ohioan oddballs Todd and Tim Tobias is not only Pollard’s longest-running side project, but it’s also the strangest. Their sound is a kind of psychedelic rock birthed from a mutant strain. It’s a creature that rose up out of toxic waste. Lots of slime, lots of teeth.

There are quiet Circus Devils records and loud ones and ones that sound like they were created by lizard men from Jupiter. Sometimes they sound like a rock band, sometimes they sound like mad scientists performing sinister experiments in a backyard tool shed. Their records are as varied as dreams, and often as haunting.

Their music comes in a few different flavors, but it all has a demon inside of it. There’s an eeriness in every sound that they make (Pollard got into the spirit and timed most of their albums for a Halloween release). It hides somewhere in even the project’s gentlest moments.

It’s a demon that runs naked and free and howling at the moon on their unhinged first record.

So, where to start with Circus Devils?

I say start at the BEGINNING. Start with Ringworm Interiors. Meet the demon. Get the full Circus Devils experience. Be surprised and assaulted like we were back in 2001 with what’s still one of the most bugfuck albums in Pollard’s whole discography.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #63: TOWER IN THE FOUNTAIN OF SPARKS

Airport 5
Tower in the Fountain of Sparks
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout made three albums together as a duo and each one is its own odd creature that just barely gets along with the others.

Tonics & Twisted Chasers is the first one. Sprout created the instrumental tracks and then Pollard came up with songs to go on top and they called it Guided by Voices because why not? It was 1996 and Tonics sounded like the mutant brother of Alien Lanes. Lo-fi. Fucked up. Weird all over, but in a familiar way. Pollard’s voice and Sprout’s guitar were sounds we’d heard work together many times before.

Five years later, after Sprout had long left the band to raise his new baby and make beautiful solo records that expanded his range into perfect piano pop and organ-heavy psychedelic bubblegum (I’ve raved here about his first one, Carnival Boy, and it’s not even the best one) he and Pollard got together again for another album, made the same way as before.

Sprout’s music, Pollard’s songs and words. That’s it, except this time they called it Airport 5.

Also, they didn’t sound much like Guided by Voices anymore–at least not in the way that many expected.

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