Robert Pollard, Normal Happiness

reviewed by dave heaton

Normal Happiness is being billed by Robert Pollard as an album of 16 two-minute pop songs, though there's really only three or four that sound like the sort of song you'd expect him to mean – catchy, hook-y, positive anthems in the style of his "hits" with Guided by Voices. But remember two things:

1. Pollard's idea of pop music is different than most people's. The GBV/Pollard world has always been one of his own imagination, where his most-surface level or deepest thoughts take hold together, coming to life via cut-and-pasted elements of the million albums he's heard in his lifetime.

2. Pollard's never displayed a clear sense of his music's qualities. That is, he seems to go with his creative flow without stopping to analyze. It might not be a mistake that the best GBV LP (Bee Thousand) is the one that had someone (Robert Griffin) helping carefully craft the sequence…or the one that was cut from a two-disc behemoth into the lean classic that was released.

Normal Happiness is in the Bee Thousand mold of brevity, if not style. That's made me warm to it quicker than I have to his previous 2006 solo album From a Compound Eye, itself a two-disc behemoth.

The songs here are in the general loud, dense and slightly warped 'classic rock' vein of other recent Pollard recordings. There's some absolutely killer hooks (on "Get a Faceful", "Rhoda Rhode") as catchy as any he's written. There's also a fair amount of sludge-y, tough guitar riffs. There's a few occasions where he slips into the odd vocal phrasing he has on stage these days, where he seems to be putting on a "I'm a rocker" stance of some kind; listen to the otherwise catchy album-opener "Accidental Texas Who' for the perfect example. There's again some lyrics that hint of social protest, some lyrics (though less than usual) that jump for surrealism full-bore, some that support the notion that the Pollard discography is one elaborate work of thinly disguised erotica, and some lyrics that sink into heartbreak. There's also some refreshingly odd touches and tactics, musically and lyrically: places where you think "what's going on here?" and enjoy feeling that way.

All in all, it's a reminder of the creative force Robert Pollard still is, what an idiosyncratic performer and musician he is. He'll never make a record that'll please everyone all around, but he doesn't care, so the train ride that is his discography is just going to keep growing…a wonderful thing.

Normal Happiness is growing on me with each listen. The more I listen, the smoother it goes down, and the more it does start to sound like a pop album.

{www.mergerecords.com}