Where are we? Where aren't we? On Mulberry Street, in Little Italy, whose famous Ventimiglia restaurant has catered many gluttonous dinners throughout Mr. Robert Pollard's touring career, which we thought had ended, and maybe he thought, too, because he made an announcement to that effect, but then. But maybe? But who knows?

It's true that announcements, like rock bands, were not made to last, which is why: New York City, where Pollard has decamped for three weeks of non-stop press conferences, interviews, photo shoots, and of course the usual round of loft parties, gallery openings, poetry slams, and helicopters.

At Ventimiglia you don't order food, they just bring it, like in Tuscany, or the Olive Garden. The place is a stone's throw from Pollard's temporary digs at the Mercer Hotel in Soho, but he didn't want to talk rock in his hotel room, and the hotel bar is literally gay. He gets hassled for autographs a couple of times on the short walk to Ventimiglia, but it's a welcome break, he insists, from his native Dayton, OH, where most of the time kids just throw rocks at him. He has some strange fans, but who doesn't? "It's a strange world," to quote from Pollard's own vasty catalogue ("Basket Of Masks," from an as-yet unreleased side project with legendary bluesman Blind Jesus Jones).

Flat-Ass Frankie brings us the first round of food, some kind of hand-rolled ravioli in a gluey cream sauce, and Pollard catches us up on the extra-musical basics before we can finish spooning the pasta onto our dish. He got married, his son got married, his son had a kid, not necessarily in that order. We have therefore unofficially entered the Grandpa Rock era, though everyone would appreciate it, a lot, if you would still call him Uncle Bob, because that's who RP is when he comes to your town and you (metaphorically) sit on his lap.

Since his last official Merge releases, the combination left/right hooks From A Compound Eye and the one after that (Normal Happiness), both of which were totally great, Pollard issued an EP of cover songs by his favorite Australian band, Silverfish Trivia, the second Takeovers record, Bad Football, featuring guests stints from some really skinny people and some big giant fat people (hence the title), started a kind of monthly Sub Pop singles-only club except it's only for his own singles, which makes a hell of a lot of sense, from a fiscal P.O.V., and released a compilation of all the best songs from the Fading Captain Series, called Crickets, which you can buy in lieu of having to buy all those FCS releases, because the only good songs from those records are on this double-disc collection. Seriously.

But you know how it is: and so does Flat-Ass Frankie, who scoops up our dishes and carries them off balanced on one prosthetic arm, while some other guy brings us two jugs of that really good red wine that comes in jugs with straw baskets around the bottom. A man gets bored sitting around the swimming pool with a thermos of daiquiris and two hyperactive cats nibbling at his toes. A man wants to write and record some more songs, and a man gets tired of having to put some of them on one album, wait a while, put the rest of them on another, entirely separate album, by which time a man has probably written and recorded like sixteen hundred new songs, and what are you supposed to do with those? Enjoy them with a candy bar?

Lucky for Pollard, then, he's got a really cool record label, Merge, who are extremely excited about the idea of letting him put out two entirely different albums at the same time, which has never been done in the history of recorded music - except for those few other times which do not count for various reasons. These two albums are called, respectively, Standard Gargoyle Decisions and Coast To Coast Carpet Of Love. One is supposed to be pure power pop, and the other raw rock and roll, but we can never remember which is which and when we listen to them they both sound pretty much the same, anyway, except for having different songs on each (obviously).

Why? Because the only kind of scam worth doing is a Royal Scam? Nice try, Annandale-On-Hudson! This dual release idea is a totally legitimate move, similar but entirely different from the way computers with Dual Core processors really are a lot better and faster than the Single Core kind. Think of Pollard's new music as Dual Core: maybe you could even call it that, too, except it sounds pretty dumb, like remember when everything was a kind of variation on hardcore, like metal-core, or scream-core, or fox-core, or emo-core, or pop-core. That was silly.

By now we're onto the pan-roasted pheasant, at least that's what Flat-Ass Frankie calls it, looks like pigeon to us, but we're not really food-core. Pollard's explaining that at first he and regular collaborator (in the good sense) Todd Tobias, who plays all the instruments RP can't be bothered learning at his age, which is most of them, considered making these two separate albums one double album. When he said double album we let out an involuntary sigh of "not AGAIN" because this has been the plan since going back to Guided By Voices days, when, as die-hard fans will remember, Tri-State Car Crash was first meant to be a triple album, "like Sandinista, but with, you know, music," said Pollard back then. And every goddamn time, the plan gets scrapped by some jobs-worth at the record company or by the pot-fueled realization that there aren't enough good songs to make up a double album.

This time, though, Pollard insists the two records developed separate identities, in a weirdly inverse case of musical Stockholm Syndrome, and insisted - the songs themselves insisted, is what he's saying - on being kept apart. On not touching, even in cyberspace, on the internets. So that's how it's gonna be, and it's kind of like the rock version of Alien vs. Predator, except the opposite: whoever loses, you win!

The time has come for straight talk. We look Pollard directly in the eyes, and he knows what's coming, because he pretends to be suddenly interested in the dessert tray Flat-Ass Frankie has just wheeled into the room.

"Explain."

"Explain what?"

"You know. The crazy lyrics, the incomprehensible song titles, the weird sounds, the fractured songs that are sometimes scary and sometimes silly and sometimes funny and sometimes heart-breakingly beautiful, sometimes in the same motherfucking song. And the outfits. All that velvet."

"It's like this." He leans across the table just far enough so we have to lean, too, and our tie goes right in the flan.

"Fuck you," he whispers in our ear, and all we can see is the flan-stain on our tie, and the absurdity of maintaining the second-person plural throughout an entire interview never mind a whole book. What were we thinking?

And then it hits us, like the lemon drop cocktails we had at the Mercer bar waiting for Pollard to meet us for dinner: Robert Pollard's music is the dessert tray at Ventimiglia. We will eat every one of these desserts, eventually. We will enjoy them both individually and as a whole. And later that night we will vomit the whole thing up into our bathroom toilet, and tomorrow we will feel great.

Highly recommended.

James Greer
Asnires-sur-Oise 2007


www.robertpollard.net

"From A Compound Eye" [CD, 2xLP] - Merge (January, 2006)
"Normal Happiness" [CD, LP] - Merge (October 10, 2006)
"Coast To Coast Carpet Of Love" [CD, LP] - Merge (October 9th, 2007)
"Standard Gargoyle Decisions" [CD/LP] - Merge (October 9th, 2007)