Overdue Record Review: Boston Spaceships, Zero to 99

Crackin’ up.

Continuing with the prescribed listening order from Townsman Kpdexter, it’s time I catch up on my overdue record review of Boston Spaceships‘ third release of 2009, Zero to 99. The first few times I spun this album it was among my least-favorite of the batch of 2009 Pollard releases that my man sent me, but over time some of the things I initially perceived as impediments to my enjoyment of the album became points of entry.

Boston Spaceships, “Trashed Aircraft Baby”

Unlike the first two Ships (as hardcore fans call them) album, Brown Submarine and The Planets Are Blasted, Zero to 99 is less focused and a bit noisier, more like what I’d come to expect from a typical Guided By Voices album. The opening track, “Pluto the Skate,” is the kind of brief F-U that Pollard left behind on the first two Boston Spaceships albums. “Trashed Aircraft Baby” revives use of his beloved Radio Shack mic. What sounds like some cheap bobo bass straining the limits of an early ’80s model Peavy amp stomps all over “Psycho Is a Bad Boy.” As I got acquainted with this album after listening to the first two I found the tight-ass in me missing the Quality Control processes that helped those first two albums go down so easily.

arijbOzqM-E]
The more I played this album, however, the more I realized that the diregard for order was key to the music of Robert Pollard. An early Jam-style throwaway like “Found Obstruction Rock and Rolls (We’re the Ones Who Believe in Love),” I eventually realize, has a place on this album, seting up the more deliberate songs that follow. There’s no curing Pollard, and that’s a good thing. Just last week I was complaining in my overdue review of Brown Submarine that I wish he’d had his musicians digging in deeper on their instruments and challenging the arrangements. Pollard will never be backed by my fantasy “cure” band of the Voidoids with Robert Quine on lead guitar or the S.F. Sorrow-era Pretty Things, but what the hell – it’s the guy’s inherent loose ends that provide the challenges to his songwriting and arranging tendencies. It’s the loose ends that allow listeners to grab onto a part of a song and claim it for themselves.

Boston Spaceships, “Exploding Anthills”

This album will continue to take more work for me than the more polished Ships’ albums from 2009 – I’m not ready to jump naked off a cliff just yet – but there are rewards for those who explore the cracks in Zero to 99.