Robert Pollard & Boston Spaceships
(Guided By Voices Inc.)
Robert Pollard is on a roll. He's been cranking out about one solo record per year under his own name lately, most recently the excellent Crawling Distance. He's done a few things with Circus Devils, most recently Ataxia in late 2008. But even more important, he's got a new band in Boston Spaceships that is very much in line with, and maybe even superior to, the old Bee Thousand-era Guided By Voices. The wickedly addictive debut, Brown Submarines, surfaced last summer and didn't get much traction until the fall. Latecomers, beware, though because there's another one already. The Planets Are Blasted, the band's second full-length in six months, is just as abrasively charming, and slightly more assured, than the first one.
As always, Pollard wraps inexorable hooks in layers of static and echo, his unstoppable choruses sounding as if they were recorded in caves. A fascination with UFOs, tattoos, queens and crowns links this material, lyrically, with dusty GBV vinyl, as does the presence of Chris Slusarenko on bass. The big rockers - "Tattoo Mission" "Headache Revolution" - borrow big guitar licks and rampant drumming (John Moen from the Decemberists) from early psychedelic Who, but it's not all 1960s homage. The slanting, sly "UFO Love Letters" has a rambunctious 1990s lo-fi aura, channeling the guitar fury of Dinosaur Jr into unusually melodic shapes. Beery romantic that he is, though, Pollard saves his loveliest tunes for the ladies. "Dorothy's a Planet" is flat out gorgeous, its folk melody unspooling languidly over bristling thickets of distorted guitar, while "Catherine in Mid October," is pure gentle bliss, as inevitable and tuneful as Big Dipper's "She's Fetching," though twice as odd.
Standout Tracks: "Dorothy's a Planet," "Headache Revolution", "UFO Love Letters" JENNIFER KELLY
