When Microsoft gawkily rolled out their Songsmith program-- you know, the thing that takes your live vocals and puts silly music behind 'em-- my first thought was of Robert Pollard. Who else but the overgenerous ex-Guided by Voices tunesmith could benefit more from a device that merely needs a vocal melody to cough up a song? Forget the album-a-month pace Pollard's seemingly been keeping these days, with his recent work from his Boston Spaceships, Circus Devils, and his latest solo effort The Crawling Distance; we'd be getting an album-a-day from Bob and his imaginary backing band. Part of me thinks that sort of thing's not so far off for Mr. Pollard already.
Guided by Voices were once a fairly centralized recording concern, but Bob's long been fond of rock-by-correspondence. And he's found quite a pen pal in Todd Tobias, a late-era GBV associate and the strongman to Pollard's bearded lady in the Circus Devils. Pollard and Tobias have been working in this manner for some time now, and the arrangement, I gather, goes like this: Pollard writes the songs, crafts some vocal demos with rudimentary instrumentation, shoots them off to Tobias for fleshing out, and sits around writing the next one while waiting for the results. It's an arrangement with its share of successes-- 2006's From a Compound Eye and last year's Robert Pollard Is Off to Business spring to mind-- but it's also one that's made for some awkward fits; Pollard's the dude responsible for the gloriously crappy-sounding pastiche of Bee Thousand and Propeller, whereas Tobias' workmanlike efforts never sound that far from the backdrop of a "Dawson's Creek" episode. Never has that rift between Pollard the songwriter and Tobias the arranger been more transparent-- and more problematic-- than on the formless, often dull The Crawling Distance, a particularly blank batch of Pollard tunes dressed to the nines in Tobias' perfunctory sheen.
Pollard's always best when he's tossed a little grit in the arrangements and kept the song lengths down to a minimum. There are almost certainly some crappy hooks on, say, Guided by Voices' Alien Lanes, but you have a much harder time picking them out when they're buzzing by your head at such a pace. The last several GBV records and Pollard's recent solo work are chock full of songs that approach the five-minute mark, and almost without fail, they tend to plod. So when Crawling Distance kicks off with the characterless piano-led four-minute rocker "Faking My Harlequin", it's a stumble the album never quite recovers from. "Harlequin" sounds a bit like a modern-era Sonic Youth song before the inevitable noise freakout, but here the tension builds but is never released. Instead, the record moves into the earwormy but stupid swagger of "Cave Zone". "Red Cross Vegas Night" is nothing more than your standard-issue Pollard-style slow starter-turned-fist pumper, "The Butler Stands for All of Us" rides a nice little rolling mod-pop melody and a sneaky guitar line into mediocrity, and the strummy dirge of "It's Easy"-- though a bit like Mag Earwhig!'s "I Am Produced" in tone-- really only has the one thing going for it: the line "tax exempt with Touchdown Jesus."
The second half fares a bit better, with the curious circular melody and Sebadoh-like downstrum of "No Island" and exciting post-punker "By Silence Be Destroyed". Alas, then there's "Imaginary Queen Anne", a nice enough slow jam sung with feeling that Pollard could-- and, hell, maybe does-- knock out on trip to the fridge at this point. "On Shortwave" is one of those maudlin but intense things Pollard's been brooding over since at least the Universal Truths days. Finally, there's "Too Much Fun (Is Too Much Fun)", on which Pollard wastes a killer verse melody with some truly dumbass lyrics then progs up the place at every other point in the song with entirely too much riffage. Hey rockers, wanna end your records on a weird note? Write one about whimsy that is in almost no way enjoyable. Works every time.
Though his vocals are fairly strong throughout, Pollard sounds a bit out of gas while pushing the pen, and these songs by and large aren't much on either structure or substance. But enduring a few lousy Pollard songs in a row is pretty much par for the course for fans of the man these days, so placing the blame for Crawling Distance's failure on Pollard's shoulders would be grossly unfair. It'd all be easier to take if Tobias were doing anything at all interesting with the melodies he's crafting around Bob's tunes. But apart from piling a few extra effects onto the plodding "Harlequin", he's giving each and every song its most baseline pop-rock arrangement. Hell, if Tobias is producing most of the stuff Pollard's putting out these days, he's a busy character, and that may go some way to explaining why all these songs were given this unimaginative treatment. And perhaps this is what Pollard wants; more records, more often, with passable sound and enough new tunes to get him through the next all-too-rare tour. But, weak as these tunes appear in their current form, one can't help but wonder how they might've sounded chopped into morsels and fleshed out with a bit more fervor. Or, hell, through Songsmith. Just about anything but how they are right now.
