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Do you ever wonder what happened to your favorite musicians of the past?

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Reviews

What Happened?

The Lone Sharks

Nine Lives

Steve Winwood

Moneyland

Various Artists

I'm Not There (Original Soundtrack)

Various Artists

Home Before Dark

Neil Diamond

Toby Keith's 35 BIGGEST Hits

Toby Keith

It's A Shame About Ray (Collector's Edition)

The Lemonheads

About a Son

Otis Blue (Collector's Edition)

Otis Redding

Wood Brothers

Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department

Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard

Is Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department an album title or a public service announcement? With Robert Pollard, you can never be too sure of his intentions, but this collaborative effort with Guided By Voices guitarist Doug Gillard is a reasonably concise collection of oddball pop songs. Gillard brings some finesse to Pollard’s free-form ‘tone-poems-from-outer-space’, playing virtually every instrument on this collection and recording the process on his home-studio 4-track machine. Yeah, I know, 4-track intimates a ‘low-fi’ process (as per standard for GBV), but the Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper’s on a 4-track, so let’s not jump to conclusions. Gillard’s input is a boon here because he renders Pollard’s impenetrable concoctions more accessible, without resorting to the semi-slick production of GBV’s more recent efforts.

Many of Pollard’s side projects would have been better left on the cutting room floor (Don’t, I repeat, DON’T spend your time or money on Hazzard Hotrods) but this is clearly a welcome exception to that rule. While nothing on this disk is begging for commercial recognition or mass airplay, it retains a consistency that focuses primarily on the inventive melodies of these fourteen selections. Of particular note is a song called “I Get Rid of You”, which is one of the most emotionally direct and foreboding things Pollard has written in some time. Still, though, the most fun on a record like this is derived from the way Pollard treats words as though they were shuffled flash cards; lines like “post-Christmas cupcake hand grenades, Soul Train college policeman” will either make you laugh out loud or scratch your head, but the fun is that he gets a ribleion, either way. To hear this for yourself, you’d best visit the band’s website at www.gbv.com
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