“Prolific” has long been the dominant adjective to describe Robert Pollard, and even then it sounds like an understatement. Deep into his fifties, he hasn’t lost a beat or slowed down a bit, but instead churns out album after album after EP after one-off solo thing after album. Already in 2013 he has released a new Guided by Voices album, a full-length under his Teenage Guitar pseudonym, a singles box set, and a 12”, with who knows what all else planned for the next six months. It’s been this way for decades now, such that Pollard’s chief trait as an artist is the frequency of his output. Consequently, it’s all too easy to forget that he’s not just a prolific songwriter, but a good songwriter, too. Indie rock’s own Joyce Carol Oates possesses an insanely deep vocabulary of classic-rock tropes, a facility with killer hooks, and an idiosyncratic lyrical style that has matured to reveal new depths of wisdom, humor, and harrumphing crotchetiness.
It should surprise exactly no-one that Honey Locust Honky Tonk is a good record: Even at his most unedited and undigested, Pollard’s music still displays a joy in its own resourcefulness, a contentment in its own faith in the power of rock and roll to define a life. In other words, every release is worth spinning at least once. But it should surprise everyone that Honey Locust Honky Tonk is a very good record, his best and most focused in quite some time. One byproduct of his prolific nature is a constant flattening out of his catalog, so that everything, especially at this end of his career, begins to blur together; the highs never seem quite so exciting anymore, the lows no longer quite so embarrassing, and very little stands out as essential. That any particular release stands out at all is by now a small miracle.
Pollard’s dedication to the form has always been impressive, and he has remained largely untouched-- or unperturbed, or uncompelled-- by outside forces or trends in rock and roll. Instead, he has burrowed deeper and deeper into his beloved classic rock and has somehow managed to find new modes of expression in this tiny realm of music. “Circus Green Machine” builds on great bursts of acoustic guitar power chords that sound like Pete Townshend is about to spin a yarn, while “Strange and Pretty Day”, the album’s lowest-fi recording, nods to Skip Spence or maybe Roky Erickson with its insistent one-note piano theme. By this point, Pollard has even become his own reference point: Scuff up the sound a bit and “Airs” or “Igloo Hearts” wouldn’t be out of place on Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes.
Even if it’s not hard to imagine a 30-something Pollard penning these new tunes, Honey Locust Honky Tonk nevertheless sounds like the work of a man with some years and experience behind him. There’s some polish on the melodies, a new forthrightness in the lyrics. And by forthright, I mean how he repeats the pretzel-logic line, “We may never not know,” ad infinitum on “It Disappears in the Least Likely Hands (We May Never Not Know)” and still makes it sound somehow poignant. There’s always been an odd melancholy to Pollard’s music, but there’s a peculiar gravity to the psych-rockin’ “Her Eyes Play Tricks on the Camera” and the country-rockin’ “I Killed a Man Who Looks Like You”. A desperate gregariousness pervades the 44-second toast “I Have to Drink” and surely informs the camp-choir sing-along that ends “Real Fun Is No One’s Monopoly”.
The guitars on Honey Locust Honky Tonk can be sluggish at times, especially during the more cumbersome anthems, and the tracklist could stand some pruning. But these are perennial complaints, excusable for being bound up among his many eccentricities, and Pollard compensates with what seems like a greater sense of mission. Mortality looms over Honey Locust Honky Tonk, explicitly defining songs like “Who Buries the Undertaker” while implicitly informing fragments like “Shielding Whatever Needs You”. Rather than dour, however, the album sounds concerned, perhaps even worried, which illuminates even some of its weaker or seemingly extraneous tracks. It focuses Pollard, who sounds like a man who has said so much already but still has so much left to say.
