28th
boston spaceships - ‘no steamboats’ from let it beard
i’ve long admitted to being a bob pollard apologist (a-pollard-gist?) and eventually stopped trying to get my “classic gbv only” friends to give them another chance… which is a damn shame because the five album run of boston spaceships, bob’s official post-gbv band, is right up there with the five album run from propeller to under the bushes that most of them hold so dearly.
i’d argue that chris slusarenko is the strongest collaborator that bob has had since tobin sprout left gbv. with boston spaceships he’s shaped bob’s prolific “write six in the can” ethos into sharp albums that still feel immediate and a little scatter shot the way those old gbv albums did. the classic gbv and earlier boston spaceship records were able to sustain that feeling for their full 30-40 minutes. with let it beard they up the ante and manage twice that length.
it’s taken me four months to digest let it beard. i couldn’t imagine writing anything about it sooner and the song i find myself wanting to talk about is an acoustic track buried towards the end on side four. i swear it sounds like a bob and acoustic guitar home demo with a couple overdubs but gbvdb assures me that chris and john moen are behind all of the guitars. and that’s exactly what’s so brilliant about chris’ work with bob. he managed to not overwork this track by recording it to death and leaving some of that first-pass intimacy untouched (listen for a slightly awkward note or two around 50 seconds in). i’m guessing he made john record his guitar on this track the same way he did the drums for the rest of the album- without much planning or practice.
the lyrics of ‘no steamboats’ seem to refer to backyard football games and the song evokes many of the other great ‘nostalgic’ songs in bob’s catalog- ‘dayton, ohio 19-something and 5’, ‘king and caroline’, ‘don’t stop now’, ‘a crick uphill’ and more recently ‘wish you were young’ and ‘go for the exit’. as with all of those songs, bob’s vocal performance carries the song all the way to the end zone. throw in some bob-on-bob harmonies and you’ve got the extra point (and the end of my football puns).
this is of course just one of twenty-six very different songs on let it beard. as with any album that fills two lps or a full cd, numerous reviews have criticized it for being “too long” or “too random”. in doing so they fail to see the album on the two levels it juggles so well- the micro view of the individual songs and the macro view of four diverse sides of music forming a greater whole.
