Space City Kicks, former Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard's first solo effort of 2011, sports some of the lovelier ballads of Pollard's career; it also finds him uttering "don't fist me when I'm down." It opens with "Mr. Fantastic Must Die", a kind of Who-does-Motörhead ruckus trip; five minutes later there's "I Wanna Be Your Man in the Moon", which comes off a bit like Something Else-era Kinks doing a Who cover of their own. At times, Space City Kicks is raucous, borderline rude; at others, it's quite lovely and ornate, the most sonically lush Pollard release in some time. For all its easy charms, it's a puzzler.
And Pollard needed a weird one. Certainly the guy knows what goes into a decent song-- all too well, sometimes. Albums like last fall's dread-suffused Moses on a Snail chug along competently enough, songs formed and played with requisite authority but without much apparent passion. The best Pollard songs have a real life to them, like he couldn't wait to play them for you; certain solo efforts, though, felt more like he couldn't wait to get the record out so he could move onto something else. Maybe that was the case with the tiresome, monochromatic Moses; the slippery, vibrant Space City Kicks seeks to atone for Moses' sins with a serious uptick in eclecticism and energy both. Mostly, though, Space City's not afraid to goof around, and the playful tone of the album's rockers seems to seep into some of the more straightfaced power-pop.
What gloriously dunderheaded Chevy Astro van fodder the title track is; in another decade, you'd drive around introducing mailboxes to metal bats with this thing jammed in the deck. The rangy, queasy "Sex She Said" is this album's "Hot Freaks"-- an outlier, somewhat unprecedented, more than a little off, and weirdly compelling. As Uncle Bob runs boudoir color commentary, the music churns, all sandpapery guitar and incidental percussion. You might not like it, but you're not likely to forget it. Dirge "Picture a Star" is so drenched in reverb, it's hard to imagine anything through the muck; it comes right before "Something Strawberry", a bright, sprightly lilter that recalls late-GBV coulda-been-singles like "The Best of Jill Hives". After that, it's "Follow a Loser", with its mopey verses and redemptive chorus, and "Children Ships", which climaxes in what sounds like the strings from Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir", only tripled, and played backward. The next song is barely a minute long, and it might just be the catchiest thing here.
So it goes all throughout Space City; Pollard and company seem especially unfiltered when it comes to ideas, yet unusually patient in bringing them to life. I've complained of constant Pollard solo companion Todd Tobias' often staid, workmanlike production in the past, but Space City is a rich, vibrant album, managing everything from the rollicking guitar-bass-drum offset of "Mr. Fantastic Must Die" to the nicely unadorned, Pollard-centric "Woman to Fly". That one's the true stunner here; drowsy at first, dazzling as it goes, it takes a simple strum and worn-in sounding Pollard melody, cobbles together some imprecise but effortlessly affecting lyrics about "a woman who's nice," sneaks in just the right kind of echo, and makes the thing sound timeless. Weird how he keeps doing that.
