Guided by Voices
Fast Japanese Spin Cycle
1994, Engine Records
Okay, I know that I said before that I’m undecided about my favorite Guided by Voices 1993-94 EP and I meant that, BUT…
If someone ever holds a gun to my head and demands an answer (by the way, I hope that nobody ever does that), I would stake my reputation in City Hall on this one.
You can’t go wrong with Fast Japanese Spin Cycle. If you like Guided by Voices, you’d have to be certifiably insane to not like this. You’d have to have mashed potatoes for brains to not like “My Impression Now”. You’d have to have bees in your ass to not like “Indian Fables”. This is another overachiever EP in which Robert Pollard sticks as many songs as he can onto a little 33 rpm 7″ (he managed eight this time). If this was the first Guided by Voices record you ever heard, it would tell you everything that you need to know.
There are two things that stand out here:
One. This contains the band’s first (and best) shots at rerecording previously released songs. These new takes all add something essential to the originals. The weird lo-fi concertina music of “Marchers in Orange” from Vampire on Titus becomes a big rocker here. If listening to the original version of “Dusted” (from that same album) was like looking through a dirt-caked window at night, this newer recording throws some soap and water and sunlight on it so we can better hear the lovely lyrics and melody. Then there’s “Kisses for the Crying Cooks”, a beautiful stripped down voice-and-guitar rewrite (or early draft?) of the fist-pumping first section of “Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox” (from Propeller). It’s a song that tells us that a fireball can also be a butterfly in disguise.
Two. Out of all of the early EPs, I think this one has a little bit more–a teaspoon or two–of Pollard’s signature hopeful melancholy. That hint of longing. That pinch of hard reality that comes from honestly observing the human condition while also creating beautiful things.
“3rd World Birdwatching” is the dreamy intro, its head in the clouds. The music sounds like a kid composed it after their first day of piano lessons while the song on top is one weird, yet innocent, psychedelic skeleton. It all achieves strange harmony and instantly pokes a wormhole into this other world.
Second track, the staggering “My Impression Now” pops and rocks as hard as “Big School” or “Pendulum” or anything else that the band had done at this point. This two-minute wonder is one of GBV’s many shoulda-been-hits. Melancholy department: The explosive chorus reaches catharsis with the line “Stand on the edge of the ledge/ Jump off ‘cos nobody cares“. It’s a line that you can’t NOT sing along with, so propulsive is everything that happens in this song. Other great lines that whirl in this hook tornado: “You’re finding out that it’s way too late/ To be happy around your friends” and “You lied a lot/ Created a plot/ To escort you safely away”. Actually, I could quote all of the lyrics because every line is great, not that I know what it all means. And I don’t need to know. The roar of this melody and the sadness of these words is something that I’m comfortable to puzzle through for the rest of my life. And that’s my impression now. And for the past twenty years.
Song numero tres, “Volcano Divers”, is straight-up sad and it’s happy to mope for about a minute, twenty seconds. “You’ve got a lot to say/ But hey, don’t say it/ So much reported and/ So much distorted“. Been there. I feel this one.
Next song, “Snowman”, is a complete mystery. “A bump is like a friendly letter”? “Everybody’s over here/ Come on over, don’t be queer”? “Before I kill you, tell me something/Where’d you hide your plastic money?“, and then something about a Polynesian. Forty-seven seconds. I like the weird fury here, even if Pollard is sending me space signals that my tinfoil hat only barely picks up.
On side two, “Indian Fables” crushes me instantly. Its not even a minute long, but I’ve been recovering from its’ lovely words and acoustic melody spinning for DECADES now (“the perfect and sometimes cruel impartiality of the sun“.)
The next three songs are those remakes that I already covered above, thank you very much, so I’ll just quote from their riches.
“Protecting what we come to know as ours/ For the colors we where in our dreams/ For the flags we fly in our films.”
“Hotter than the fire we built/ Darker than the truth/ Ignorance reflected in the windows of our youth/ Push me now beyond the bounds/ Of healing hands and thorny crowns/ And all the sadness it implies/ I’ve tasted with my own two eyes.”
“A girl of God becomes a cash flower/ A catalog of gardens and grain”.
I don’t know anything about Engine Records, except that Guided by Voices gave them one mother of a record when they handed ’em this one.
Ha! This WAS my first GBV record. Got it when I was 16. Wasn’t so sure about the first “song,” but My Impression Now almost instantly sealed the deal.