Robert Pollard

Normal Happiness (Merge)

By Anne C. Johnson
Published: November 14th, 2006 | 10:06am

It’s not easy keeping up with Robert Pollard and his inexhaustible creativity is well documented. Normal Happiness is actually Pollard’s second solo album this year following up, From a Compound Eye, which was a double album. It’s almost enough to make you resent him. Yet when “Whispering Whip,” makes its second mind-blowing key change in under a minute and a half, Pollard lovers are, as usual, well served.

Robert Pollard fans come in several varieties. Those who enjoy the tributes to his musical heroes will thrill this time to his dead-on Roger Daltrey on the Who-like “I Feel Gone Again” and the terrific nod to the Fab Four on “Tomorrow Will Not Be Another Day.” The heavy boozing constituent will take pleasure in his obligatory I-drink-too-much lament, the swaggering “Give Up the Grape,” which could be his best yet. Some of the mellower aspects of the 1970s, like Jefferson Starship (”Join the Eagles”) and fellow Midwesterners Styx and early Chicago are investigated here and may be lost on some of the younger members of his flock. But then, this was a man who had a whole new generation singing along to “Baba O’Riley.”

Normal Happiness is fully realized Robert Pollard plus all of the elements — bewildering song titles (“Gasoline Ragtime”) and delightfully confounding lyrics (“A Cyclops swallowing passwords”) — that made early Guided By Voices so magical. As always, his love of rock music just resounds throughout. Just listen to the guitar solo in “Get a Faceful” for proof.