Release date: 11-06-2007

2007 editon 12 titles vinyl lp. Turn to Red is one of the three post GBV sides that Bob released after the sprawling F.A.C.E While decidely minor. Sealed.

Tracks:
01. Do You Get Your Wish? 
02. Insane/Cool It 
03. First Spill Is Free 
04. Mojo Police 
05. Scuffle with Nature 
06. Sweet Jelly 
07. Fairly Blacking Out 
08. Wig Stomper 
09. Public Dance 
10. Be It Not for the Serpentine Rain Dodger 
11. Bullfighter's Cut 
12. Jancy 

The Robert Pollard/Guided by Voices, etc. discography is lengthy enough that it's bound to include overlooked gems. For me many of these are the collaborative albums, the recordings built by Pollard and someone else, often in a back and forth sort of way, or with Pollard adding vocals to the other musician's instrumentals. In theory these albums might be as slight or awkward as critics often claim they are, but usually they're not. Albums like Lifeguards' Mist King Urth, Airport 5's Life Starts Here and Go Back Snowball's Calling Zero are fully formed trips to another universe – cohesive, rich and rewarding albums, pushing Pollard's music in a fresh direction by fusing it with someone else's. To that list you can add The Takeovers' Turn to Red, the best of the three collaborative Pollard albums is releasing this month. It's a joy, filled with white-collar weirdness and warped rock pleasures.

The Takeovers is Robert Pollard (vocals, plus guitar on a few tracks) and recent GBV bassist Chris Slusarenko (instruments), along with a few guest musicians filling in parts here and there. At 12 songs it's quite a compact work, especially for Pollard. That compactness is part of its appeal. There's a restraint that somehow pushes the album further towards mystery, leaving open spaces and question marks, even while the music often hits with a sublime punchiness built from riffs and hooks. Turn to Red also benefits from Pollard taking his compulsion to throw odd answering machine messages and similar silliness into his music, and using it for creative purposes, instead of just for kicks.

Turn to Red is loosely a portrait of one man – lonely, mentally unstable, a Vietnam vet (making the album a spiritual relative of Pollard's Kid Marine, perhaps). Its introductory track mocks the idea that any art work can every portray one person's life, and then the album proceeds to both contradict that idea and basically affirm it, by offering a cut-up, filled-with-puzzles version of a biography.

The Takeovers' style of rock points toward the sort of rock touchpoints always associated with Pollard – the Who, Wire, the Beatles – but it's all sliced up and heard through a certain slanted filter. The songs revel in catchiness and in explosions of rock energy, and they cut against them - stopping tunes short, throwing in harsh, nervous yells reflective of the album protagonist's inner state of conflict and anxiety. Songs like "Scuffle With Nature" give the album s rock-opera quality, but tell no clear narrative. As the half-hour album nears its end, our askew biography is taking turns strange and thrilling. In the middle of all this is a superlative pop-rock anthem, "Be It Not for the Serpentine Rain Dodger," where Pollard's especially youthful singing hearkens back to the early days of GBV while the melody and Who-like swagger make it just as invigorating as most of that band's classics.

That hidden single is the lead-up to the enigmatic narrative's climactic point, the weird and wonderful six-minute "Bullfighter's Cut." This song creeps forth in a haze, with Pollard sounding like he's taking the role of a narrator or storyteller (our biography author). As the song proceeds, he sounds increasingly bewildered – holding on to sounds (the ending "s" in "loneliness"), finishing a lyric like he's in the process of falling asleep. At the height of his confusion, and of the song's mystic rock fog, he cries out for horns – "c'mon give me some horns!" – and he gets them, in the form of an out-of-tune trumpet that sounds like it's been battered. It feels like a brilliant surprise, and also one of those Fight Club moments when the supposedly all-knowing narrator turns out to be crazy, and the point is hammered home: the content of a story depends on who's telling it, like the weird anchorman voice tried to tell us on track -luna music