Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

This is a Robert Pollard project. Do I need to say anything else? Okay, I will. Circus Devils is a side project of Robert Pollard’s which has been going on since 2001, well before the plug was amicably pulled on Guided By Voices. Circus Devils is similar to GbV, only more so. Some people love Pollard and some hate him (I probably fall more into the former camp, though there are days where it’s close). What distinguishes Circus Devils from other Pollard projects is the presence of the Tobias Brothers, Todd and Tim, who have a band of their own named Clouds Forming Crowns in the Akron/Cleveland area.

The beauty of Pollard’s methodical madness is thoroughly demonstrated on SGT. DISCO. Thirty-frigging-two tracks, ranging in length from the thirty-five second “The Baby That Never Smiled” to “Brick Soul Mascots (Part 1),” the equivalent of an opus for Pollard at a massive four minutes, ten seconds. The titles are in themselves entertaining, and, at times, actually seem to have something to do with the composition for which they are named. The recording is probably mid-fi, with Pollard affecting that faux-Brit accent, sounding like he’s singing through a megaphone like a British pop singer of the 1920s. Sometimes its endearing, sometimes its irritating, but it‘s Pollard, and that is what you‘re gonna get. Stylistically, SGT. DISCO is all over the place. “Caravan” is not unlike Trout Mask-era Captain Beefheart, “Lance The Boiling Son” could be a Peter Gabriel/Genesis outtake. “War Horses” could have come from some accessible, and therefore discarded, track from The Residents. And, I swear that on “Hot Lettuce” Pollard lifts a snatch of Jorma Kaukonen’s guitar solo from Jefferson Airplane’s “The Ballad Of You and Me and Pooneil. The whole project sounds as if a producer walked into the recreation room at a mental institution full of Berklee graduates, turned on a four track and said to each resident, “go for it.” Oh, and then mailed the whole thing back to us from twenty years in the future. Almost everything on SGT. DISCO is short enough that if you don’t particularly like something it’ll be over pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you like a track such as “French Horn Litigation,” you can play it over and over until it gets so deep under your skin that you’ll wake up in the middle of the night and hear it playing between your ears on endless repeat. In that sense, SGT. DISCO may be the perfect album project. The whole to this sumbitch is much greater than the sum of its parts. There’s no point to downloading a track here and there from SGT. DISCO; it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. Whatever tracks irritate you just make you appreciate the ones you like all the more. And you’ll play those irritating ones over and over as well, the same way you keep probing that sore spot on your gum with your tongue.

I have all sorts of tracks that involve Robert Pollard, probably too much, but my collection would be incomplete without SGT. DISCO. You need this stuff.