Letting Sunlight In

Guided by Voices “Kid On A Ladder”

The thing I always tell people about Robert Pollard is that you don’t realize the extent of his genius until you realize that he’s written at least 100 songs you love. He’s written a lot of duds, sure, but dwelling on that distracts from the overwhelming number of great songs he’s written in the past 25 years or so. On the scale of quality in the Pollard discography, “Kid On A Ladder” probably rates a solid B. This is such a Pollard-y song, to the point that it can feel a bit Pollard-by-numbers on a structural level. The melody and rhythms are familiar, and the way the song moves through its parts efficiently before leading to a clear conclusion in just under two minutes. Having heard so much of his work over the years, I think one of the defining characteristics of his music is the way his songs almost always progress toward a definite ending, like they’re all well-formed little paragraphs of sound.

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