Moen's got a steady hand or two and a young er man's urge to push the songs forward. And Slusarenko and Pollard go back to the last days of GBV, a period that saw that band's simple, stately side occasionally bogged down by the showy in Pollardworld, that's code for "infallibly competent" playing of Doug Gillard.
And Brown Submarine is not a showy record. Matching easy Cheap Trick melodies with a slightly sharpened take on his usual logorrhea, the tunes on Brown Submarine go straight for the raised fist and the open heart. With its longer songs, varied textures, and reasonably hi-fi sound, it's a record on the cusp of cohesion with only a modicum of his typical hijinks.
If the past few years saw Pollard working through a hyperprolific and confused period, all seems startlingly crystalline here: Brown Submarine is a four-on-the-floor, prefix-optional rock'n'roll record that, unlike virtually all of his recent work save Off to Business , requires no prior investment in Pollard to be worth your coin. Bummer that it kicks off with a bit of a non-starter: "Winston's Atomic Bird" is pretty much the chunky stuff of old, built around an acrid hook and the same kind of buildup to nowhere on which those Earthquake Glue tracks relived so heavily.
The mercifully short title track does a little better, matching an intentionally dumb lyric with a nifty little guitar turnaround. But "You Satisfy Me" does what its title promises, and heartily so; and from there on, Pollard's on a roll, kicking out jam after snappy little jam imbued with genuine urgency and lingering melodic notions. The rockers, you know, rock: "Ate It Twice" is a pretty good little punk skiffle, and "Rat Trap" clamps down from the onset and doesn't let up long enough to either make sense or get stale.
And the ballads, though notably a bit dusty in melodic terms, get over on feeling. The line in "Two Girl Area" about Axl Rose will almost certainly run a little deeper through you than anything on Chinese Democracy will, and album highlight and closer "Go For the Exit" stands as one of the maybe two dozen most memorable songs in Pollard's catalog.
Lyrically, Pollard's still as inscrutable and frequently unmemorable as ever-- "you you you you satisfy me" and the Axl quip are the most direct things he says over 35 minutes. But after the oft-embarrassing drunk talk that populates recent records like the aforementioned Superman and the Circus Devils' gnarly Sgt.
Disco , the relative clarity of vision in Pollard's words seem to match that of his new band's. Plus, if you're this deep into a review of a Bob Pollard record, you know damn well you don't listen to the man to pore over the words.
If there's a bone to be picked with the current direction, it's that Brown Submarine like Off to Business , is but a single victory in a larger battle against complacency; the book remains written largely as before, with a few necessarily but hardly radical revisions. Teaming up with some fresh collaborators seems to have done Pollard a world of good after recording the bulk of his post- GBV work with Todd Tobias handling all the instruments; Moen and Slusarenko don't bring a striking level of chops to Brown Submarine , Boston Spaceships ' debut album, but their work has an organic feel and a natural energy that helps these sessions sound like the work of a real band, and Pollard has thankfully focused on quality rather than quantity in his songwriting, with most of these 14 tunes suggesting the vitality of GBV 's peak period without sounding as if he's rewriting his old work, which was the case with too much of his work in and Pollard and his partners don't sound as if they're breaking much new ground on Brown Submarine , but that doesn't seem to be the point with this album -- it doesn't reinvent the wheel but it lets it roll very well indeed, and hopefully this is a sign that Pollard is ready to make up for lost time after an unexpected fallow period.
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