Although never explicitly stated, the Robert Pollard promise has always been that, no matter how many noise barrages or half-sung, half-howled spoken word passages the listener has to endure, there's always a catchy, harrowing mini-anthem waiting around the next corner. Circus Devils, one of Pollard's Fading Captain pet projects, stand as one of the few exceptions to this promise. Teamed with multi-instrumentalist/producer and former GbV producer Todd Tobias, Pollard cedes much of the duo's songwriting to his more sonically dark and experimental buddy.
At this point, Pollard's catalogue has grown so voraciously that putting each album into some sort of context seems impossible and, at best, pointless. However, many parts of Sgt. Disco sound like direct reactions against 2005's gawky Devils release Five, an album particularly harsh on Pollard's melodic allure. While we're still light years from a pop album in the GbV sense, Pollard's vocals inch closer to center stage than before, his bizarre tics evolving into more palatable grotesques of various rock genres. The vague, bristly sound collages of Five appear to have gelled to form more straightforward pseudo-grunge tracks. Power chord stompers like "George Took a Shovel" and "Outlasting Girafalo" capture the early 90s Pearl Jam/Stone Temple Pilots aesthetic, with Pollard's comically deep Vedder growl justified by clever songwriting.
In fact, for any Pollard project, GbV or otherwise, Sgt. Disco sports a surprisingly high number of verse-chorus-verse structures. Tracks like "In Madonna's Gazebo" harness the power of skewed noise rock riffs within a pretty conventional format, and even the avant-garde film score synths of "The Constable's Headscape" settle into a hummable chorus. In fact, excepting two lengthy blocks of shapeless experimentation on the album, one never has to suffer through more than a few minutes before hitting a coherent rock hook.
For brief moments, the duo even scrapes away enough muck to let some heart shine through. Psych ballad "Rose In Paradise", the album's penultimate track, feels like a breath of fresh air after an hour-plus of overdrive assault. The three-minute centerpiece (if such a thing exists on a 32-track album) "Swing Shift" especially harkens back to the GbV days of poignant albeit oblique pop gems, the familiar guitar and bass setup simply replaced with synth and sound effects. These bright spots considered, though, I'm not going to lie; the Circus Devils still make records that are taxing to listen straight through. However, with strategic skipping and a stomach for Pollard's beefiest rock posturing to date, Sgt. Disco proves much less a shitshow than its predecessors, but rather a pocket of sanity in Pollard's otherwise mind-boggling oeuvre.
