Музыка и песни Pollard, Robert / Pollard, Robert на CD

"Honey Locust Honky Tonk" is a compact wonder and so varied, tuneful, graceful, magnificent and ebullient that you'll be forgiven for thinking that ROBERT POLLARD has saved his best for his own album. Slicker in some ways than recent GUIDED BY VOICES efforts, though not without its own down-home charm, its seventeen songs still whiz by in 34 minutes, stridently showcasing POLLARD's songwriting mastery with some of the best tunes he's ever penned. The longest, the semi-stately album closer "Airs" clocks in at just over three and a half minutes, but most are in the two or two and half minute range typical of POLLARD's attenuating genius. "I'm not afraid to be immature, to make a fool of myself," he recently offered as a reason why he's been able to continue writing music at such a high level for so long. "I'm not afraid to look insane." The only thing crazy about a song like "It Disappears In The Least Likely Hands (We May Never Not Know)" is its slightly loopy title. The song itself, a chugging Heroes-era BOWIE anthem whose entire lyrics are contained in the title, is a marvel of both concision and affect, featuring the full force and range of POLLARD's voice, which has never sounded better. Sure, it's an over-used trope of rock bios to say that such-and-such or so-and-so "has never sounded better," but that doesn't make it not true. (Two can play at the double negative game!) For any other guy whose reunited band has just finished putting out four full albums and an EP in eighteen months, the release of yet still again another solo album might seem excessive, to say the least, but "Honey Locust Honky Tonk" sees POLLARD on top songwriting form. He's done it again, folks. "Honey Locust Honky Tonk" is as sweet and as sharp as anything ROBERT POLLARD and friends has ever produced. Bite it and see. Style: Independent

While he's explored pretty much every highway and dark alley of song craft in his long career, he's never before applied one consistent approach over the course of even one record. The new technique is considerably more disciplined: he first collects - in the (figuratively) selfsame notebook - phrases and titles, bits of overheard conversation, snatches of misheard movie dialogue, thus providing an assortment of lines all of which he considers strong enough to serve as potential song titles. He then assembles these song titles into lyrics, which because each line is strong enough to stand on its own, contain neither bloat nor the least misstep. When he's happy with the lyrics, he writes a melody for each lyric. He then sits down with the guitar and figures out chords that fit the melodies. Sounds pretty straightforward, but for ROBERT POLLARD the result provides a structure uniquely suited to his muse. From the rollicking Anglophilic "Extra Fool's Day" to the pithy, elegiac "This Place Has Everything", "Blazing Gentlemen" is no mere confectioner's conceit. Veiny with POLLARD's signature depth-charged melodic inventiveness, multiple listens reveal multiple meanings, shape-shifting moods, and lyrical twists that will delight even the word-shyest rock-phobe. The music itself is standard-issue POLLARDIAN guitar wizardry, unusual chord progressions made up of unusual chords jutting against off-kilter rhythms in ways that shouldn't work but never do not, only to be overshadowed by another bravura vocal performance, occasionally larded with (unusual) harmonies or plain weird delay/reverb/compression effects that only ever add to the tremendous bustle of joy (see "Lips of Joy" for an on-the-nose demo) applied liberally like primer to the multi-hued tracks. ROBERT POLLARD fans are fond of making extreme statements in support of their favorite songwriter Style: Independent

Faulty Superheroes has a tossed-off, effortless magnificence that the rash of indie-whatevers trailing in his wake from Bee Thousand to the present constantly strive for, and fail to achieve. The constant sense of surprise, of wonder, of discovery that you routinely find in superbly-structured instant bomp classics like "Faster The Great" is not something that can be taught, or learned, or imparted, or copied. Pollard pretty much abandoned the four-track for twenty years now and still gets tagged as "lo-fi," which is a word that makes even less sense now in the days of digital recording than it did then in the days of occasionally tape-hiss smothered coulda-shoulda- been hits. "Take Me To Yolita" in lesser hands could have been not much more than a bad one-liner stretched to fit a pop song, but Pollard reverse-engineers the titular pun to build a Kinks-like mini-epic that elevates the raw material of the song to transcendent heights. "She walks to him but that's not him." Damn. And so it goes. Are there bum notes here and there? Recording accidents-on-purpose left in like crushed empty beer cans strewn around the miniature, glimmering pop/ rock/ psych/ prog construction sites left standing in the wake of each of Faulty Superheroes' finished/unfinished songs? You betcha. Record Label: Fire Records Style: Independent

Robert Pollard's new solo album "Mouseman Cloud" shows the Guided By Voices frontman in a playful and spontaneous mood. This is a record by a guy who just wants to rock, and not have to worry about how that rock will be received by anyone other than himself. While the songs here are not a world away from anything you'll find on GBV's "Let's Go Eat The Factory", the emphasis on "Mouseman Cloud" is on wordplay rather than melody, on unkempt exploration rather than trad song structure. A lot of the tracks sound as if they started as lyrics - even poetry - first, and were fit around the sounds, which is not an uncommon way for Pollard to work, but the album's gleeful verbosity could be interpreted as the work of a man who's maybe been feeling the pressure of expectations from (for instance) a Guided By Voices reunion and just wants to cut loose. Recorded in collaboration with producer/multi-instrumentalist Todd Tobias, "Mouseman Cloud" is catchy, heavy, lovely, rocky, exuberant, complexly Style: Independent

Style: Independent

Even for a guy whose famously abundant output makes a joke of the word prolific, this has been a spectacularly prolix year for Robert Pollard. Jack Sells The Cow is his second solo album in a year that has already seen the release of two reunited Guided By Voices records and will see yet a third before it's done, along with a fair amount of touring. So what makes this a Robert Pollard record as opposed to a Guided By Voices record? The best answer is that it's just a matter of nomenclature, but the absence of contributions from other members of the reunited GBV is probably the easiest way to put Jack in its box, if putting things into boxes is your thing. "I'm as true as true can be," Pollard sings on the pithy pop anthem "Big Groceries," from which the album at least obliquely derives its title (in the sense that one verse, at least, seems to refer to the old English "Jack and the Beanstalk" folk-tale, or something like that), and much of Jack seems preoccupied with larger themes: "Pontius Pilate Heart" with judgment, "Winter Comes To Those Who Pray" with the faith/doubt schism, "Big Groceries" with objective vs. subjective truths, and on and on and over and out. At least, that's our reading. That reasonable people might disagree on the precise meaning of Pollard's lyrics doesn't mean they make no sense, as those who take the trouble to handle with care will likely discover. And if not, hey, that's cool. The superabundance of melody and densely-packed stylistic swerves and flourishes on Jack rival anything he's recorded recently, and while five albums in a year might strike some as overkill, you have to imagine Pollard's relentless output is a less than calculated move - a smarter businessman would hold back product so as to build demand, but Robert Pollard has never been a businessman. He's an artist, full stop, at a time when it seems that every artist/musician is expected to have an M.B.A. He puts out records because he likes the records (Bogq knows he's scrapped enough proposed albums to fill many another group's entire discography). And he hopes you'll like them too. Jack Sells The Cow sails over the moon of your heart in a snappy thirty-two plus minutes, and despite its relatively heavy subject matter comes off as perhaps the sprightliest, most light-footed music Pollard has recorded this year. Of the quincunx of Bob-related releases this year, we'd suggest you put this one in the center, and hold tight. These suckers move Style: Independent