In Stores Now: We All Got Out of the Army by Robert Pollard

Illustration from the Mongolian children's book Baby Sheep by Dashdorj Natsagdorj, 1957

Robert Pollard, the endlessly prolific and consistently excellent songwriter from Dayton, Ohio (and former frontman of the BEST BAND EVER, Guided by Voices), has released his first of five or six full-lengths he has slated for 2010. It's called We All Got Out of the Army, and it's a set of songs that show a logical progression of the songwriting style he's been developing over the last couple years. It's not a move in the direction I like best in Pollard's music (i.e. the pop/psych axis of Pollard's "Four Ps") - his solo albums have been lately been leaning more toward the prog/(post)punk direction, with the possible addition of a fifth P, "plodding hard rock". But I've resigned myself to the fact that there are Pollard fans whose tastes are radically different from mine (i.e. they don't think that "In Stitches" and "Zoo Pie" are the worst songs on Do the Collapse), and this new one is probably just the album for them.

Having said that, I'm actually kind of grooving on the more rocking sound of We All Got Out of the Army. A couple of the songs are just dumb, thumping "rawk" - I'm looking at you "Rice Train" and "On Top of the Vertigo" - but the harder rock sound works well when mixed with other elements, as on the single/opening-track greatness of "Silk Rotor", where a gooey chorus hook repeats as the song builds up to a thick instrumental jam. A couple other songs have this "hard pop" sound, like the hooky "Your Rate Will Never Go Up" and "Cameo of a Smile", with short interludes like the breezy "Talking Dogs" and lo-fi acoustic "Wild Girl" provide brief respites from the riffage onslaught.

Producer Todd Tobias contributes his usual sounds (hello again, cheapy fake-Mellotron synths), but Pollard's recent inclination to provide more the album's guitar leads is much appreciated. There's some great guitarwork on this record. And Pollard's varied vocal approaches on We All Got Out of the Army, including an unexpected amount of talk-singing, work better here than the weird-voice antics he's been playing with on recent albums. The most unfortunate thing is that these songs would really come to life in a live setting - I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, "I never really liked that one song from the album (e.g. "I'll Replace You With Machines") until I heard him do it live." I've got to wonder why Pollard would write an album full of songs like that, now that he's pretty much given up performing live altogether.

"Talking Dogs" by Robert Pollard