Boston Spaceships, Our Cubehouse Still Rocks

review by dave heaton

Robert Pollard has been making all kinds of interesting and eccentric pop-rock music in the years since Guided by Voices broke up, but Boston Spaceships predictably gives fans a chance to get excited, for the sole reason that it’s a rock band, thus having the air of something closer to GBV. All of that said, Boston Spaceships does make Pollard sound more driven than usual. Each of their albums seems to be consolidating that drive. While not without their odd detours or slightly sour tastes, these are solid pop-rock albums that present fairly straight-ahead, mostly potent bursts of Pollard’s pop-collage vision.

Our Cubehouse Still Rocks has some great big melody moments like “Fly Away (Terry Sez”) and “Come On Baby Grace” some lower-key melodic ones (“John the Dwarf Wants to Become an Angel”, “Stunted”, “Saints Don’t Lie”), sort of psychedelic dirges (“Freedom Rings”, “Bombadine”, “Airwaves”) and at least one meandering, pretty little fairytale ballad (“King Green Stomp”). It all gets pretty nonsensical at times, which can be a lot of fun, like he’s playing with words just for how they sound together, or just saying what comes to mind. “Saints Don’t Lie” gives us this great Pollardian everyday life bit: “You carry on like the Wyndham / I carry on like the Soho / I always liked their windows”.

{www.robertpollard.net}