Robert Pollard, Moses on a Snail

review by dave heaton

Like clockwork, a new album from Robert Pollard or one of his post-GBV bands brings press quotes declaring it the best thing he’s done since Guided by Voices’ heyday, while most everyone else ignores it or considers it another exercise in excess and non-editing. Usually the truth is in the middle somewhere, even as increasingly his output seems to be settling into a more consistent groove, even while it picks up in number. So far in 2010, he’s released one Circus Devils LP, one Boston Spaceships EP (with an LP coming soon), and two albums under his own name. The second of these, Moses on a Snail, has me uncomfortably perched on that cliff towards hyperbole for the first time in a while.

That is, it strikes me as the strongest album Pollard has issued under his own name, or any name, in years. It has no songs that function as jokes; none that self-consciously rock; none that bear vocal mannerisms that get in the way of the melody; few (I won’t say none) that lean towards past successes by sounding like previous songs he’s written. In other words, little to no places where he shoots himself in the foot, where you can hear the makings of a great song but something’s in the way.

At 12 songs, it’s succinct. The songs hold together, standing in that spot between introspection and surrealism that Pollard can hit so well. The album starts wistful, with strings over a medium tempo as he sings ominously about “The Weekly Crow”, in a cemetery setting. A pretty and strange song with drive, it builds towards a release of sorts. The lyrics stay cryptic in a representative way: “Dead ringers for your trees / slave agents for your knees.” The funeral tone is kept on songs like “A Constant Strangle” (life’s not just a constant struggle, it’s a constant strangle), the sardonic “Lie Like a Dog” and “How I’ve Been in Trouble” – songs about domestic terror.

There’s a rock core that’s slow-burning and shimmering on these songs, but more pop pleasures elsewhere, like on the jagged “It’s News”, the soaring anthem “Arrows and Balloons” and “It’s a Pleasure Being You”, one of several songs on the album with a triumphant feeling similar to GBV’s Isolation Drills. “Each Is Good in His Own House” might have fit on that LP too, from its tune and the sense of yearning it summons. It sounds yearning while also seeming more like a judgment of others than a personal plea.

The thoughtful, apocalyptic worry spread across the LP comes to a head in the five-minute final track, a snarling ballad of following a prophet out the wilderness, but the prophet’s moving “very slowly”: “Moses on a Snail”. There’s a nasty rock workout halfway through, a jam that seems all about letting loose the tension inside – tension built of frustration with the world and with other people. The way that pulls together the album while also being a surprise is one more mark of this LP’s cohesion and depth.

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