Rockbites: Robert Pollard’s sixth solo release: one step beyond

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Robert Pollard’s sixth solo release: one step beyond
3 March 2003

The guiding light of Guided By Voices goes further underground with his most difficult music to date.

It’s been a long, strange trip for Robert Pollard, who founded his low-fi/psychedelic collective Guided By Voices two decades ago at age 26. The band started as a basement trio in Dayton, Ohio, with a variety of temporary names and little expectations of recording or touring. Pollard kept his day job, teaching fourth graders, right through the ever-evolving GBV’s 1992 breakup and until their reunion a year later.
    Through it all, this American midwesterner has remained true to his quirky indie ethic despite the occasional taste of commercial success. On his sixth solo album, Motel Of Fools, the extraordinarily prolific Pollard (who claims to have composed some 500 songs before high school, and he’s recorded some 800) makes his values abundantly clear with 32 minutes of perhaps the most difficult listening he’s released to date.
    Pollard begins the new set with a medieval, troubadour-style, a cappella songlet, “Truly I saw a fallen wig upon its way/ Truly I saw the undetermined person.....” The plaintive voice, recorded in an echoey room, trails off momentarily as electronics fade in, joined by hard left-right panned, twin acoustic guitars and ultra minimalist drums.
    It’s a strange way to begin a strange record. Pollard recently said “I’ve always wanted to make an album like this.” His brother and collaborator Jim concurs: “It’s unlike anything Bob has ever recorded.”
    Interspersed among the identifiable tracks on Motel Of Fools are recordings of a baby and of drunken parties, and a half-speed fragment of a song he did with side project 3 Dream Bag. On The Spanish Hammer, things get weirder as ’60s acid-psychedelia merges with a cassette sample from Pollard’s old metal band, Anacrusis.
    There’s nothing aggressively strange here—that would miss the point—but Pollard hasn’t compromised an inch in these song structures or in his love of ad-hoc, serendipitous delivery. Like Julian Cope’s Skellington/Droolian records from a previous decade, Motel Of Fools is unabashedly an acquired taste, and decidedly one worth acquiring. | Fading Captain series | | Robert Pollard's songs | | CD from Amazon.com | | top of page |

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