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airport 5: tower in the fountain of spark
BY DAVE LONGSTRETH
Airport 5 is the latest moniker for fading captain Robert Pollard, who writes more songs than anyone can keep track of. In 1984, he started the band Guided By Voices (GBV). In the mid-'90s, GBV, which then included Tobin Sprout—the other half of Airport 5—recorded several albums, including Bee Thousand (1993) and Alien Lanes (1994), that quickly became indie classics for their great melodies, nonsensical (and often hysterical) lyrics, and lo-fi weirdness. Soon, Pollard began recording albums on different labels under various names because his record company would only release one album a year.
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What distinguishes Airport 5 from the bevy of other Pollard music is its nakedness and lack of artifice. It is a sparse and harsh affair. But unlike the more graceful soul-baring of GBV's Isolation Drills (2001), Airport 5 is bumbling and often clumsy. And while his mid-'90s lo-fi masterpieces integrated similar qualities with meticulous care and delicate humor, Airport 5 seems at once more straightforwardly haphazard and deliberately awkward.
The instrumentation was recorded entirely by Sprout. The tones are generally terrible, digital, and cold. The album's flaccid guitars, its ice-blue wash of digital reverb, and its heavily digital-delayed snare drums (à la "Total Eclipse of the Heart") all sound like the "professional studio demo" your high school's rock band was so proud of. But where the amateurism of GBV's four-track recordings made for a warm and playful intimacy, here it is alienating.
So why would Pollard and Sprout make an album of such deliberate awkwardness? The awkwardness is not so obvious that it draws attention to itself and becomes funny; it feels subdued and frustrated. It's subtle in a way that makes me wonder whether it's even intentional. I feel genuinely uncomfortable listening to Pollard's tuneless screech in "Subatomic Rain" or to the mild Johnny Rivers-impersonation-contest vibe of "Up the Nails." This uneasy ambiguity is at the core of Airport 5 and may be precisely what Pollard is trying to evoke.
Tower in the Fountain of Spark expands upon the feelings of alienation, loneliness and anxiety that permeate Isolation Drills. Rather than describing these sensations, Pollard makes us feel as he does, an expressive feat as inventive and moving—and as cryptic—as any of his other great work with Sprout. (Luna)
All materials © 2001 The Yale Herald, Inc., and its staff.
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