Someone who records this much has to be something of a documentarian, so I wonder if Robert Pollard has reflected on how his first year without Guided by Voices will be considered with hindsight. By my own quick count, this is the fifth album he's put out in 2006, and one of those was a double. He recorded From a Compound Eye over a year-and-a-half ago, sure, and Normal Happiness has been sitting on the shelf for some time as well. Despite working with other contributors, all these records have sounded quite a bit like GbV. This isn't a bad thing, but it casts anything that comes out of Pollard's mouth otherwise in further suspicion. Normal Happiness is supposed to be the record full of two-to-three-minute pop songs (as if that's something out of the ordinary for him), but to anyone who bought that: This album could easily be the third disc of FaCE, even if it is a bit more cohesive than Pollard's debut on Merge records.
What people keep missing with the "that Pollard, he sure still sounds like Pollard, oh boy" sentiment is that the ratio's changing. In swimming through the man's overwhelming output, fans know there are a lot of records with a lot of bullshit on them, along with usually one or two perfect pop revelations that remind us why we listen to Guided by Voices-- and, fuck it, rock'n'roll-- in the first place. That's not so here, nor has it been the case all year. Pollard is actually sprouting consistency: "Supernatural Car Lover" gently ambles past with serviceable low-key melody and charm, "Serious Bird Woman (You Turn Me On)" feels surprisingly light for its sluggish tempo, and "Rhoda Rhoda" weaves drunkenly from its own circular and stupidly catchy tune. In general, the brief tempos and economical structures of the tracks have the same get-in-and-get-out conciseness of Pollard's sharpest early material, for GbV or himself.
I don't feel relieved by any of this. I feel like Pollard's autopilot has just become a bit sharper, probably because he's leaning on it more often. There's keyboard gloop to pop up half-baked material like "Join the Eagles", there's some new wave keyboards to make the (admittedly great) chorus to "Whispering Whip" pop a little brighter, and none of it sounds that bad. It just sounds like the rest of the record. Normal Happiness is a slightly-above-mediocre release from an artist who never dared to be mediocre; just inconsistent. Now, all I'm expecting from Pollard's next outing is a decent, status quo rock record, and there's never any shortage of those. We need Pollard to remind us why we need them, and I've waited in vain all year for him to do so.
