Guided by Voices
Under the Bushes Under the Stars
1996, Matador Records
In music, even a well-liked band runs the risk of nobody talking about them anymore in a few years. Whatever charms they may have had at their peak fade away for audiences and critics. Maybe the music business itself kicks them around so hard that they lose their drive. Maybe they coasted on an exciting new movement and then slipped everyone’s mind when everyone got over it. And that’s just off the top of my head. There are as many ways for today’s music sensations to become tomorrow’s nobodies as there are ways to die.
That wasn’t going to happen to Guided by Voices. This was their ninth album (tenth if you count King Shit and the Golden Boys). By this point, Robert Pollard was playing the long game and in the long game you can’t be lo-fi forever.
Well, okay, yeah, you can if that’s what you like and if that’s what inspires you.
It was inevitable though that Guided by Voices were going to go for the studio sound. They were going to get out of the basement. Anyone who saw their live show could tell you that. Anyone who heard Robert Pollard talk in interviews about his main influences–The Who, The Beatles, Genesis and Wire were. and still are, frequent names that come up–could tell you that. Anyone who was buying the singles, which often boasted hi-fi versions of previously lo-fi tracks, could tell you that. Anyone who knew the band’s story could tell you that.
Also, Guided by Voices were used to change. All of their 80s and early 90s albums sound like a band starting over each time. Figuring things out. Honing a vision. Each new album was a new chapter in the story. A corner turned. A distinct entity. Never a repeat of what came before.
This continued even after the band found an audience after several years of anonymity. Vampire on Titus didn’t sound like Propeller. Bee Thousand refined the band’s basement sound further, dousing it in ever more dizzying melody and wide-eyed enthusiasm. Alien Lanes stayed in the basement, but went more bombastic and cynical.
And now we have Under the Bushes Under the Stars, still another step forward. They made this one in a studio, BUT Pollard still felt that Guided by Voices sounded best on record when they were a little fucked up. So, while this album is hi-fi, it’s a very weird sort of hi-fi. It’s an ocean of treble with only a tiny murmur of bass.
The guitars sometimes sound like amplified sheet metal. The drums are a little thump in the background. Pollard’s vocal is clear, but he also sometimes sounds removed from the band, a head floating up above everything else, applied to the mix with Scotch tape.
A major label might have taken issue with it, but I love the way it sounds. What do I know about sound quality, though? I like rock music.
And I like Under the Bushes Under the Stars. A lot. It’s a roundhouse punch of song. It’s the sound of a band stretching out and achieving new levels of agility as it swings between beautiful melodies, unapologetic anthems and art-rock mystique.
They’re shedding their lo-fi underdog skin, moving away from the tape hiss and fuzzy basement other-worlds of their previous LPs and buying real estate in our sweaty real world. The fairy tale imagery is gradually going away. They’re growing out of the weird, absurd little songs (“Kicker of Elves” and “Pimple Zoo” wouldn’t fit here). They don’t sound like Dayton, Ohio’s little secret anymore. They don’t sound like a weird homemade project anymore.
They sound like a rock band.
They sound like they’re going on tour and this is an album of songs that are made for the stage. (They performed most of this album in sequence at some shows back then.)
It begins rudely, with the band at full blast in the first second. INSTANT noise. Dive for your volume knob, rip off your headphones. “Man Called Aerodynamics” is here to assault your ears and deliver an oddly relaxed little melody in the midst of the rampage. Things calm down for a bit on “Rhine Jive Click”, which begins with naked tension before it starts pounding toward the end and leads into the single-ready rocker that is “Cut-Out Witch”. (Let’s also mention that according to the internet’s hub of GBV/Pollard information, GBVDB.com, Robert Pollard plays every instrument himself on “Man Called Aerodynamics” and “Rhine Jive Click”) .
“Burning Flag Birthday Suit” stretches and yawns with real art-rock beauty and it leads up strikingly to “The Official Ironmen Rally Song“, in which Pollard delivers a promise, via a thunderous anthem that rightly got put out as a single, that, no matter what changes that Guided by Voices goes through, he’ll never turn his back on the psychedelic vision that’s been at the center of everything that made this band special in first place.
Tobin Sprout’s gorgeous “To Remake the Young Flyer” wafts in like smoke through beaded curtains afterward and I’m instantly high and ready for “No Sky”, a loose and lovely anthem full of Midwestern open air.
Then comes “Bright Paper Werewolves”, which is Pollard’s nickname for lottery tickets as well as the title of a sparse, ghostly song that addresses “get rich quick” illusions.
Side 1 closes with a beautifully weary rocker, “Lord of Overstock”, on which Pollard sounds like he’s been singing all night.
It’s a side so good that I sometimes play it twice. That’s no insult to side 2 though, which is just as triumphant.
It kicks off with another anthem, as it should. “Your Name is Wild” is a real open-hearted ass-blaster with lyrics that boast one of my favorite bits of Pollard wisdom. “The useless fade in time”. Can’t argue with that.
“Ghosts of a Different Dream” is ecstatic in the most infectious way. I have no idea what Pollard is singing about, but I’m always ready to jump along to it. The chill-out comes next with “Acorns & Orioles”, a stark and acoustic little moonflower that deals with a common dilemma among anyone who tries to make art. “I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.”
Pollard’s smokey song “Look at Them” and Sprout’s quick instrumental drone “The Perfect Life” have always sounded like one track to me. And they still do, even now that I know better.
Both provide the cool-off that we need before the rapturous “Underwater Explosions” comes in to get us jumping again. “The sound will carry on”. That’s no lie. Twenty-three years later, some of us are still hooked.
Then Tobin Sprout checks in once more with “Atom Eyes”, another one of his best, a winsome pop song about the power of taking a break from the everyday.
For the home stretch, the band reaches back into their archives and shines up an old song, “Don’t Stop Now”. It originally appeared as a very rough diamond on King Shit and the Golden Boys. Here, it’s one of the band’s all-time most uplifting moments, a song about perseverance and moving forward that Pollard has often introduced on stage as “the ballad of Guided by Voices”.
Most bands would end on that high note, but Pollard’s a weirdo and he often throws in one more song after what sounds like the grand finale–he likens the final song on album to the closing credits music in a movie, he’s said in interviews–and that song here is “Office of Hearts”, a little strutter that sounds to me like a portrait of a slick ladies man on the prowl. Something sexual is going on, at least (“Come feel the softest parts / In the office of hearts.”)
And that’s it for Under the Bushes Under the Stars, folks! It was lovely having you here. Have a good night. Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. See you in the funny papers. Don’t forget to tip your server. Drive safely. Arrivederci. Au Revoir. Adios. Do visit us again for more Robert Pollard reviews here on The Constant Ble–
OH WAIT, there are six more songs.
What’s the story on these? Under the Bushes Under the Stars went through a maze of changes before it became what it became. They recorded a few songs with Steve Albini. They were then going to record a bunch more songs with Kim Deal producing, but then cut those sessions short when Deal’s method clashed with the band’s. She’s the type who records everything fifty times until it’s perfect while Pollard sees nothing wrong with banging out an album in a day.
Somewhere in there, Pollard intended to make this an epic-length concept album (the story of a rock band) called The Power of Suck. Then he changed his mind about that, ditched the concept and cut it all down to a leaner affair called The Flying Party is Here.
THEN, sometime during the whirlwind year of 1995 when all of this was happening, Pollard had a brainstorm of new songs that he thought were better than what he previously had lined up. So, he started over with the fresh batch, scrapping almost everything from the earlier proposed album, which had already been submitted to Matador Records and was being prepared to go to press.
Whew! Usually, it’s THE LABEL that rejects the album. This was a very rare case in which the artist is the one who cancels a release in favor of something better. (And, to their vast credit, Matador went along with it.)
(To see just how crazy this all was, check out this amazing chart on the always helpful GBVDB.com.)
Anyway, I remember an old post from about fifty years ago on the ancient Matador Records forum, back when internet servers were steam-powered and you had to shovel coal into your computer to keep it running, in which someone from the label explained that when Pollard made like Jason Vorhees at Camp Crystal Lake and slashed up The Flying Party is Here, he chopped out some really great songs. So, the label talked him into putting a handful of them back on the album, if only as bonus tracks, pretty please.
Yep, bonus tracks. That’s what the last six songs are. They’re not listed on the back of the vinyl sleeve or the CD case (though I believe they were originally on a sticker on the shrink-wrap). On vinyl, they’re on a separate 12″ 45 rpm disc, like a hidden EP.
Let’s talk about ’em. They’re all top-notch. Also, this is where some of those Steve Albini (under his Fluss pseudonym) and Kim Deal tracks ended up.
“Big Boring Wedding”, a Power of Suck outcast recorded by Kim Deal, thanks you for such delicious pie, passes the word that the chicks are back and gives the world another signature GBV fist-pumper.
Up next, Tobin Sprout shows us that he can do anthems, too. He’s not just the pretty pop song guy. His “It’s Like Soul Man”, a refugee from the Steve Albini sessions, reaches for the rafters.
On “Drag Days”, Robert Pollard is the pretty pop song guy. I think it’s about the lull between tours, but it’s anything but a downer. The melody is pop-tastic and the lyrics know that the drag days are gonna turn around.
“Sheetkickers” is my favorite, as well as Pollard’s greatest break-up song. Are you going through a rough patch? Has your love life become a smoldering wreck? Have you been cheated on or kicked to the curb? Has she told you that she needs some space and just wants to be friends? Are you a nervous wreck? Well, I’m not saying that “Sheetickers” and its rapturous build up to Pollard repeating with authority “I’m over you” is a miracle cure, but it’s a step in the right direction. Also this is one of the Albini tracks and you can tell. Big fuckin’ drums on this one.
Things get melancholy on “Redmen and Their Wives”, a stretched-out beauty and luscious slow-burner that meditates on whether there’s more to life than getting married, getting a job and then waiting to die. The band had been playing this live since early ’95, even releasing it on For All Good Kids before this Kim Deal-produced studio take.
And finally another set of closing credits with “Take to the Sky”, a nice acoustic guitar-driven rocker that smells like the old basement. It bounces off the walls and empty beer bottles and takes flight.
It’s all ends up as a massive album in more ways that one. It’s a record that you don’t just play and then file away. You need to live with this one for a while. There’s so much happening on it and this is exactly how GBV needed to sound in 1996. Whatever convoluted path it took to get there was worth it. This is big and beautiful and exhausting. An old man like me needs a nap afterward.
See ya later. For real this time.