Author: Jason

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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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Robert Pollard-Mania! #62: CHOREOGRAPHED MAN OF WAR

Robert Pollard and His Soft Rock Renegades
Choreographed Man of War
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Choreographed Man of War is a raw and yet weirdly theatrical rock ‘n’ roll album from a guy who’s (mostly) done talking about his divorce and wants to get happy again.

If Isolation Drills, which came out a mere three months earlier, confessed sins and left blood on the walls, this one just roars and makes your ears ring. Still, the two records sound to me like curious companions.

Both Guided by Voices albums on TVT Records have follow-ups on Pollard’s own Fading Captain Series label that feel deliberate in how they complement and contrast what came before. In the warm tones that issue from your speakers, they’re the sound of Pollard washing off the major label stink, scrubbing it away with tape hiss and homemade sleeve art. They’re albums free of the music business bullshit, the expensive studio time and the label heads and their opinions.

It goes deeper, though.

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Things I Will Keep #21: THE MURMAIDS, “Popsicles and Icicles”

The Murmaids
“Popsicles and Icicles” b/w “Huntington Flats”
1963, Chattahoochee Records

Everyone talks shit about vanilla, but it’s my favorite flavor.

The word itself is often used as a synonym for boring or bland. You can lead a vanilla lifestyle with vanilla interests and have vanilla sex–and no one who describes it that way means it as a compliment.

Vanilla is also typically white, like a politician’s shirt or the plain walls of an unfurnished living room or Pat Sajak–and that’s supposed to be bad, too, I guess.

You hear these slanders about vanilla all of the time, but you won’t hear ’em from me because I LOVE IT. I’m crazy about it. Vanilla is refreshing and cozy. I’m even nuts about the scent of it. Furthermore, vanilla, like me, may look very white, but it has Mexican roots (all real vanilla is derived from an edible orchid plant indigenous to Mexico; the Aztecs of old were way into it).

In that sense, I am vanilla. I identify.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #61: GLAD GIRLS

Guided by Voices
“Glad Girls”
2001, TVT Records/Festival Mushroom

If “Glad Girls” went nuclear on the radio in 2001 that would have been cool with me.

“Hold on Hope“, by contrast, would’ve been a problem. Who wants to keep explaining that one?

“Hey Sugar Britches, who’s your favorite band?”, someone in an alternate universe might ask me.

“Guided by Voices,” I would say.

“Oh, those guys who did ‘Hold on Hope’! I love soft-rock bands like that. Are they still around? What other good songs did they do?”

I don’t have the patience for that conversation. I’m too much of a jerk.

“Glad Girls” is more like it, though. “Glad Girls” IS GBV.

It’s loud, slick and produced to throw down with any other rock song on the radio in 2001. It’s also one of Robert Pollard’s specialties, which is THE ANTHEM. It gets you going. It clubs you over the skull. It’s half-song, half-thunderbolt.

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THE WORLD’S END at the AGFA Secret Screening #79 at the Richardson, Texas Alamo Drafthouse, 10/7/2020

Edgar Wright’s pub crawl comedy oddball was the first movie ever screened for the public at the opening of the Alamo Drafthouse location in Richardson back in 2013. As of October 7, 2020, it’s also the last movie that they’re going to show for awhile because all North Texas Alamo locations are closed up again. The announcement came that same day.

Hey, it’s 2020 and we can’t have nice things. Hollywood aren’t taking chances with their hyped releases in theaters during a pandemic and the crowds aren’t ready–or haven’t yet been convinced–to come back. Many Alamos in the US remain open, as of this writing, but in North Texas, they’ve decided to step back into indefinite hibernation. It’s just temporary, they say, but who knows?

So, host and local Alamo creative director James Wallace treated Secret Screening #79, the show’s seventh anniversary to the day, like it was the last.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #60: STIFLED MAN CASINO

Airport 5
“Stifled Man Casino”
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Tobin Sprout brings the snap-crackle and Robert Pollard brings the pop for this second single from their Airport 5 project. “Total Exposure” is the quiet one and “Stifled Man Casino” is the loud one.

It’s the anthem. It’s the mic-swinger. On the surface, it could pass for power pop circa 1981 from a band of young new wavers in jeans and T-shirts. Maybe one guy in the group rocks the loose skinny tie look. Didn’t Airport 5 open for The Pretenders a few times way back when?

“Stifled Man Casino” kicks like that sorta thing. It’s surging and youthful–and then you tune in to the lyrics and you hear the truth.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #59: TOTAL EXPOSURE

Airport 5
“Total Exposure”
2001, The Fading Captain Series

Isolation Drills hadn’t yet cooled off in the new release racks back in the spring of 2001 when Robert Pollard was already promoting more records coming out over the next few months on his Fading Captain Series label.

The one that had us all buzzing was Airport 5, a new collaboration with Tobin Sprout.

Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout together again! OH MY GOD! Indie dorks like me fainted at the very thought.

The resulting album is a lovely piece of work, if not quite the tonic that some expected, but we’ll have plenty of time to talk about that later (the album will be #63 in this series). Preceding it were two 7″ singles of preview tracks (with non-album B-sides, of course) and the first one was a song that I like to call “Total Exposure”.

Because that’s what it’s called.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #58: ISOLATION DRILLS

Guided by Voices
Isolation Drills
2001, TVT Records

Robert Pollard gave the mainstream dream of fame and big money and an overplayed radio hit that eventually annoys everyone exactly as many chances as it deserves.

Two.

A restless artist like Pollard can’t beat his head against that wall for too long.

Two shots. That’s enough. In most cases, the first album is the best that the band can do at the time in this new place and with these new expectations. The second is for sharpening their blade and improving on whatever wasn’t quite perfect about the first.

Obviously, Robert Pollard, with his fifteen years of putting out good records at the time, didn’t need to “find himself” after Do the Collapse, but there are a few things about it that the band had to throw off before they could move on to this second grab at the golden apple.

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A Laurel and Hardy Party #10: BELOW ZERO and TIEMBLA Y TITUBEA

(1930; director: James Parrott)

Depression-era comedies such as this one feel freshly relevant in today’s Age of the Pandemic, when many of us are teetering on the edge of ruin. Who knows? Maybe this winter, I’ll be on the street with an instrument that I have no idea how to play, busking for pennies, and having snowballs thrown at me.

The opening title card explicitly sets this mean and funny little short in the winter of 1929. Money is scarce, but snow is plenty. It falls in harsh blankets on the city where Laurel and Hardy have set up shop as street musicians. They play one song over and over again (“In the Good Old Summertime”, hilariously). One suspects that it’s the only song that they know. Or at least Stan Laurel knows it, sorta kinda. He plays a hint of the main melody repeatedly on a portable organ while Oliver Hardy plucks random strings on a stand-up bass like it’s the first time he’s ever touched one, or any other musical instrument, in his life.

Everyone hates them, of course–and those instruments don’t have long to live.

That’s the first half.

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