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Georgia Straight
Shawn Conner

Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard
Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department   
#4 in the Fading Captain Series

Thanks to Chris Walters for transcribing!


Look, I know how slavishly addicted to the work of Guided by Voices leader
Robert Pollard I must seem, and really, I tried not to review this record.
But it’s simply too damn good to ignore and I feel I would be doing a
disservice to you, Georgia Straight reader, in not alerting you to the
treasures to be found therein.

When last we caught up with the prolific Mr. Pollard, he had made his bid
for mainstream acceptance by hooking up with former Cars dealer Ric Ocasek
for last year’s glossy Guided by Voices disc Do the Collapse. But, except
for a couple of tracks showing up on the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
the record didn’t do much to raise the 15-year-old band’s profile. Speak
Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, another in a long line of lo-fi
side projects from Pollard, finds him teaming up with regular GBV guitarist
Doug Gillard.

It’s a great idea; the Dayton, Ohio, songwriter has found, in Gillard, a
perfect foil.

Pollard’s love for big guitar rock is no secret, and his collaborator seems
to have a bottomless source of memorable riffs. This is apparent in
guitar-driven rockers like "Pop Zeus" and "Tight Globes" and the heavier "Do
Something Real", as well as the solo in "Slick as Snails"—a track that also
features some of Pollard’s best singing on a tricky vocal hook.

But the real star here is, of course, the singer’s melodic wizardry. "And I
Don’t (So Now I Do)" is the kind of effortlessly catchy tune he can
apparently write in his sleep. "Larger Massachusetts" is a quietly
astounding driving song that improves with every listen. Even the tracks
that don’t at first sound like keepers —"I Get Rid of You", "Same
Things"—eventually land some pretty great hooks. And don’t even get me
started on the lyrics—suffice it to say that I haven’t been able to get the
phrase "Electric newspaper boy" out of my head all week.

I’d like to say that this will be my last review of Pollard’s work for a
while, but it probably won’t. This September Rockathon Records will issue a
four-disc set of 100 previously unreleased songs, totalling more than four
hours—from the songwriter’s vault. I already have a copy on order.