Guided by Voices
Plantations of Pale Pink
1996, Matador Records
As I said way back about a hundred years ago when we talked about the group’s 1987 album Sandbox, Guided by Voices to me are a psychedelic band. They’re drunken Midwestern psychedelia. Robert Pollard can craft a hell of a pop song, but he also likes the kind of noise, distortion and weirdness that can scramble your eggs harder than you might like if you came here expecting The Power Pop Skinny Tie Homecoming Dance Revival. The songs may be short, the budget may be low and the equipment might not be the best, but the vision is expansive.
Even better, there’s nothing pretentious about GBV’s brand of fuckery. They don’t have that art school thing going, despite having two visual artists in the band, master of the collage Pollard and painter Tobin Sprout. They’re not from New York City or San Francisco. They’re from Dayton, Ohio. Their roots are blue collar–and it shows.
When they get weird, it sounds like nothing more or less than regular guys fucking around in the basement, shutting out the rest of the world and accidentally creating their own worlds. Those are some of my favorite GBV records.
I’m talkin’ the lovingly wrecked Vampire on Titus. I’m talkin’ the supremely drunk Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer. I’m talkin’ the band’s majestically screwy 2012 comeback album Let’s Go Eat the Factory (can’t wait to get to that one in this series; I consider it a major work).
And I’m talkin’ the nightmarish Plantations of Pale Pink. It’s the best of the band’s EPs that happened after their 1993-94 explosion of 7″s. It’s a bad trip in the best way.
The sound of the whole affair is fuzzy lo-fi, but it’s also really LOUD. I’m not Audiophile Andy so I’m not the best person to throw around terms like this, but to my ears this sounds hyper-compressed. It sounds like a fuck-ton of sound packed uncomfortably tight into one little container. A mixed drink made to turn you upside-down on the first sip and kick your ass into the next day.
And it comes off as an intentional assault. No dorky mastering complaints here. I think that this record sounds exactly like how Pollard wanted it sound: strange and radioactive. Everyone here sounds drunk and high. Including the drum machine.
How else should a record sound when it begins with “Systems Crash”, a song about everything fucking up “all over the globe”? It’s some kind of apocalypse rendered with a no-nonsense little melody that barges into your brain and stays there. It sounds like a TV show theme song. When it was recorded in 1995, the internet was a thing that existed and that was useful, but it wasn’t yet THE dominant thing. We didn’t have social media. Nobody but cult leaders had “followers”. Nobody had an internet connection in their back pocket. The internet hadn’t yet taken over the economy and social interaction. The internet was still hanging on the edge between reality and science-fiction. Fast forward to today when we’re dependent on it and we accept that. We trust it. It’s major news if Twitter, Facebook or Youtube go down for ten minutes (“Systems crash/All emotions are flying”). And here’s a prescient song about the machines all going tits up from a guy old enough (Pollard would have been 38 at the time, according to my calculations) to see the new world coming and be cynical about it.
Now that the world has ended, that sounds like the perfect time for “Catfood on the Earwig” to me. It’s a mean little tension-builder that lays its bombast big and proud behind its lo-fi veil. It’s a strange but grandiose song that the band played live for a short spell in the late 90s.
Side A ends with “The Who Vs. Porky Pig”, a title that sounds like the non-sequitur of the year until you learn that it’s a parody of an ancient Who studio outtakes bootleg called The Who Vs. Bizarre Mr. Pig. Meanwhile, the song itself sounds less like The Who than it sounds like the meanest garage band of 1968, leaning hard into its growling riff while they piss away a song in which the singer goes on about some mostly unintelligible nonsense on top (“They sell rocking horse balloons/ To the celebrated children/ And the weeping circus”?). It’s totally goofy. And it rocks. I love it.
Flip over the 7″ like the champ that you are and you get the “hit” of this set, the quick and dreamy acid ballad “A Life in Finer Clothing”. It’s got a lovely rainy day verse, but no chorus whatsoever, which is totally cool and makes sense on a record that’s this fucking mental. Sometimes in this life, beauty happens and it blows right by you.
… AAAAAND it leads into “The Worryin’ Song”, a blast of paranoia that quickly enflames and then soothes our collective souls until the grand finale.
That’s “Subtle Gear Shifting”, a phasy, droning piece that sounds like the LSD zombies taking over while Pollard sings/chants about “jet-speed solar triangles” and “crystalized painter tea”. He also seems to know exactly what “plantations of pale pink” means, even if we don’t. It’s a descent into confusion, a maze of free association and absurdity. Every line comes off like a clue about what really happened to Laura Palmer.
Let’s also mention that this was one of two EPs released on the same day in November 1996. The other was Sunfish Holy Breakfast. Sunfish got a CD and 12″ vinyl release, while Plantations was 7″-only because Matador knew that this one was for the really big freaks. (It would show up on CD in 2003 for a Matador box set that this website will get to one of these decades.)
Let’s further mention that all of these songs were a part of many of Robert Pollard’s different early drafts of what eventually became Under the Bushes Under the Stars. Neither of the two EPs were ever presented or talked about at the time as “outtakes collections”, though. They were just two mysterious new records from a band who couldn’t seem to stop writing and recording.
For people like me, they fed our obsession well.