For a while there, it's seemed the template for the lion's share of Bob Pollard's post-Guided by Voices material was the 2003 effort Earthquake Glue. To these ears, Earthquake Glue has always seemed like a bloated, proggy affair frontloaded with a few winners but bogged down by a glut of unsteady melodies, unshapely guitars, and hooks that never quite come around. These markers have followed Pollard to varying degrees ever since, and last year's one-two punch of Standard Gargoyle Decisions and Coast to Coast Carpet of Love was the nadir of that particular style: the simultaneous release of two gangly records didn't work for Springsteen or Elvis Costello, and it sure as hell wasn't about to restore ever-shakier faith in the fate of our Fading Captain.
In 2008, Pollard seemed to free himself from the Earthquake Glue muck. Could be that raiding the archives in preparation for January's enjoyably stupid "old songs, new parts" curio Superman Was a Rocker reminded the dude of what's been missing, but whatever's gotten into him lately will hopefully stick around. This summer's Robert Pollard is Off to Business stands as his most tuneful offering since the last GBV album proper; sure, it leaned a little closer toward the "Hold on Hope" schmaltz than, say, the weird poignance of "The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory", but you came away from the disc remembering what you'd heard. It had been far too long since he's sustained that over the course of an LP.
And now-- and, apparently, for the foreseeable future-- we have the Boston Spaceships, which even Pollard's calling the "new band." With long-distance contributions by his Takeovers partner Chris Slusarenko and Decemberists drummer John Moen, Pollard has crafted his liveliest set since late-period GBV banger Universal Truths and Cycles. He's also got a band about as well-suited to his strengths as any he's held since the Tobin "Due for a Reappraisal" Sprout days. Moen's got a steady hand or two and a young(er) man's urge to push the songs forward. And Slusarenko and Pollard go back to the last days of GBV, a period that saw that band's simple, stately side occasionally bogged down by the showy (in Pollardworld, that's code for "infallibly competent") playing of Doug Gillard.
And Brown Submarine is not a showy record. Matching easy Cheap Trick melodies with a slightly sharpened take on his usual logorrhea, the tunes on Brown Submarine go straight for the raised fist and the open heart. With its longer songs, varied textures, and reasonably hi-fi sound, it's a record on the cusp of cohesion with only a modicum of his typical hijinks. If the past few years saw Pollard working through a hyperprolific and confused period, all seems startlingly crystalline here: Brown Submarine is a four-on-the-floor, prefix-optional rock'n'roll record that, unlike virtually all of his recent work save Off to Business, requires no prior investment in Pollard to be worth your coin.
Bummer that it kicks off with a bit of a non-starter: "Winston's Atomic Bird" is pretty much the chunky stuff of old, built around an acrid hook and the same kind of buildup to nowhere on which those Earthquake Glue tracks relived so heavily. The mercifully short title track does a little better, matching an intentionally dumb lyric with a nifty little guitar turnaround. But "You Satisfy Me" does what its title promises, and heartily so; and from there on, Pollard's on a roll, kicking out jam after snappy little jam imbued with genuine urgency and lingering melodic notions. The rockers, you know, rock: "Ate It Twice" is a pretty good little punk skiffle, and "Rat Trap" clamps down from the onset and doesn't let up long enough to either make sense or get stale. And the ballads, though notably a bit dusty in melodic terms, get over on feeling. The line in "Two Girl Area" about Axl Rose will almost certainly run a little deeper through you than anything on Chinese Democracy will, and album highlight (and closer) "Go For the Exit" stands as one of the maybe two dozen most memorable songs in Pollard's catalog.
Lyrically, Pollard's still as inscrutable and frequently unmemorable as ever-- "you you you you satisfy me" and the Axl quip are the most direct things he says over 35 minutes. But after the oft-embarrassing drunk talk that populates recent records like the aforementioned Superman and the Circus Devils' gnarly Sgt. Disco, the relative clarity of vision in Pollard's words seem to match that of his new band's. Plus, if you're this deep into a review of a Bob Pollard record, you know damn well you don't listen to the man to pore over the words.
If there's a bone to be picked with the current direction, it's that Brown Submarine like Off to Business, is but a single victory in a larger battle against complacency; the book remains written largely as before, with a few necessarily but hardly radical revisions. The faster stuff is pretty much in line with the key tracks from Mag Earwhig!, and the lesser of the slow jams could very well be on any of the records after Do the Collapse. But in paring down many of the eccentricities that bogged down a lot of the post-GBV work and finding a couple dudes who obviously love and understand what's made Pollard worth the frustrated adulation in the past, they're firing on nearly as many cylinders as anytime since GBV's mid-to-late 90s heyday. If these Spaceships of Pollard's keep killing it live and putting out records worth hearing straight through-- the next one's already due in January-- they can cherry-pick from the best bits from the past all they want.
