Guided by Voices
Universal Truths and Cycles
2002, Matador Records
This album came out in June of 2002 and it ruled my summer. I spent the whole sweaty season thinking about these nineteen songs again and again. In 2021, I still do.
The only good thing about my depressing new office job back then was that you could live in your headphones all day. It was a lifeless setting in which I craved lively music. Singer-songwriters and slow stuff never lasted long in my portable tape deck (before download codes and cheap digital players came later in the decade, dubbed cassettes were the least fussy way to listen to your vinyl away from home).
I needed music that rocked and made bold leaps between moods. I wanted albums that you could live with and ponder and have a different favorite song every time you played it. More than ever, I needed music that sounded like a world to explore, a place to go when you’re lost.
Man, it was as if Universal Truths and Cycles was made just for me.
Now, I have sugary words all day for GBV’s previous two albums, Do the Collapse and Isolation Drills. They’re inspired works with great songs, but they do play the major label game. A little compromise here and there comes with the territory and Guided by Voices handled it about as well as a band can, which means that they emerged with their soul intact.
A lot of bands leave their major label deal with a few missing limbs and their heart stomped to pieces and sometimes you don’t hear from them ever again.
Guided by Voices were made of harder stuff, though. They were a band of players who’d been around the block, together and in other bands. They walked away from TVT Records and back to Matador Records as spry as ever and maybe with a mind to show off what a well-tuned machine they’d become.
They changed drummers (goodbye, Jim McPherson; hello, Jon McCann, who played on the album, and hello, Kevin March, who played on the tour and stuck around for the next few years), but otherwise it was the same crew that had toured steadily since 1999 and had nurtured a powerful sound along the way. Another change was that Pollard brought in Todd Tobias to produce (with assistance from John Shough and Scott Bennett, say the credits). No doubt Uncle Bob was as wowed as I was by the diverse sonic witchcraft of Ringworm Interiors and wanted to work more with this guy who seemed capable of anything.
The result was Universal Truths and Cycles, my pick for the best Pollard record of 2002 and one of my very favorite Guided by Voices albums.
Pollard’s vision–he’d talked about it for a year–was to go prog-rock and the band recorded a pile of songs in that vein. They were heavy sounds and heavy moods for an LP that was originally going to be called Heavy River. Then a little later, he wrote a batch of ultra-short songs and the group went back into the studio to bang those out, too.
I still remember a post on the Matador Records forum from way back when someone from the label revealed that they received an early draft of the album that opened with “Wings of Thorn” and “Car Language” (two songs later moved to the middle of side two), so there was at least one alternate sequence in play while Pollard figured out what to do with all of these songs.
The sequence that he ended up going with was one that Todd Tobias put together.
The Tobias sequence was manic and challenging, darting left and right and up and down. The longer “prog” songs gave the short songs mystique. The short songs gave the longer songs a weird energy, like this whole thing could go off the rails at any minute. It wasn’t a prog album exactly and nor was it pop. Universal Truths and Cycles was something else.
It was an album that only Guided by Voices would make.
It was an album that made their return to the indies sound like a victory lap.
It opens up wired right away with, well, “Wire Greyhounds”. It pounces on you immediately, all thirty-five seconds of it. Its lyrics reference one of Pollard’s songwriting methods. He’s talked about it a lot. He misreads and mishears things and then turns those into lyrics and titles. Sounds from a TV in another room. Muffled conversations just barely within earshot. Or as Pollard sings here “Sit up and beg/ For slivers of language/ That the night air might offer.”
The mood is established. There is no concept here. No pattern. No message. This is just a songwriter out watching and listening to the world around him. Who needs more than that?
The second song “Skin Parade” could almost pass for another band. Actually, it could pass for two other bands. Its sleepy, demo-style opening section (just voice and acoustic guitar) in the beginning contrasts fiercely with the machine-like smack and splat of the main body and the effect is nightmarish. The “weird track 2” is a normal thing on Pollard records, though. It tells you right away that this ride will be unpredictable.
It’s also normal for track 3 to come in and save us and that’s exactly what “Zap” does. It feels like yet another band. This time they’re acoustic melody-spinners on the pastoral path. Their words don’t rhyme, but their tunes bring the sunshine. Did “Skin Parade” upset you? Well, “Zap” is gonna make it all better. It’s a prog moment, but with a gentle touch. Breathe in that fresh air. Smell those flowers.
Now, track 4 is still yet another band and THESE are some prog motherfuckers. They could go on for twenty minutes, but they don’t. They squeeze their epic into just under four minutes of loud, electric rapture. That’s “Christian Animation Torch Carriers”. It’s as huge and grand as any other GBV recording and it’s my enduring favorite song here.
I’ve never been able to get a good read on Pollard’s religious views. There are positive Christian references here and there (“A Crick Uphill” comes to mind right away), but I never assume that a songwriter’s every word is a direct personal message. Sometimes songs are about characters or they’re ironic or the words just sounded good.
There’s something to this one, though. Or at least it resonates with my own questions about The Big Issues. I used to think that I knew everything. Now, I’m old and realize that I know nothing. The tricky thing about religion is that nobody really knows anything. People will try to convince you that they know things, but they don’t matter. The real argument is internal.
My favorite line from the song is “This is a shallow hole, but faith makes it safe”. Sounds like a good place to be. In your head, heart, and soul, at least.
After that heaviness, I need a silly pop song and that’s where “Cheyenne” comes in to dance around and sprinkle fairy dust.
“The Weeping Boogeyman” is the pensive comedown. It’s half-song, half-setup for the next song. It’s a dreamy cloud of fog before “Back to the Lake” jolts us to life with its infectious take on the problems of parents with college age kids. We’re out of the prog-rock fantasy world. Sunlight blasts through the kitchen’s open blinds.
The fifty-four-second “Love 1” jump-cuts into that. It sounds like a garage band just getting started at practice, but they’re already hot and driving. Meanwhile, the words aren’t just nonsense–they’re aggressive nonsense. “Svelt melta – pussyheart”? Whatever. Let’s rock and think about what it means later.
After that, “Storm Vibrations” comes in and we ride the heavy river of sadness and lots of guitar for nearly five minutes. It’s one of those GBV songs made for a stadium. At the time, Pollard liked to slide in moody groovers like this at around the end of side 1. There was “In Stitches” on Do the Collapse, “The Enemy” on Isolation Drills. And here, “Storm Vibrations”. Each one was better than the last, more beautiful and angry.
“Storm Vibrations” sounds like the end of the side, the end of the album, the end of the band, but NO. Guided by Voices are always throwing us off. That’s where “Factory of Raw Essentials” walks in and Pollard, in full Peter Gabriel drag, tells us about “circular beast exhibits” and “palefoot front runners” in a quick minute and twenty-two.
Side one closes weird and mysterious.
The flipside begins in just the opposite mood. It blasts off with the easy pick for the band’s summer single, “Everywhere With Helicopter“. It rocks, it rolls, it’s as commercial as anything they did for TVT minus the compromise.
In Jim Greer’s book, Guided by Voices: A Brief History, all that Robert Pollard has to say about “Pretty Bombs” is “Totally means nothing. It’s about germs.” Maybe so, but it sure sounds like a groupie song to me. A touring band, new “girlfriends” in every city. Temptations. Pretty bombs.
Guided by Voices aren’t Kiss, though. The endless party lifestyle wasn’t Pollard’s thing and that’s why “Pretty Bombs” is so… contemplative. Road sex happens and maybe it’s fun for the moment, but, to Pollard, there’s an empty feeling when you check out of the hotel and head to the next city. You can hear it in the words (“Loving arms attack you/ With promises for when you check out/ Are they so intrigued/ By far off places over there?”) and in the melody and in the way that a string quartet wraps around it all like Morning Glory vines.
Whatever it’s about, it’s one of the best songs on the album, a pretty valley that sits between two rockers.
The next song, “Eureka Signs”, is one of a helluva summer storm. You know that Pollard is into The Who, right? This is one of those songs where you can hear that loud and clear.
I have no idea what the hell it means, but this verse always get me:
Hell in the eye of consensus
Approaching shreds of night
In bleakness, blind as the ocean’s mind
You want to look behind you
You told me to remind you
“Wings of Thorn” and “Car Language” are brothers to me. They belong together. The first one charges the field, expert hands working the reins of the horse. No wonder it was the album’s opening track at one point. It’s a prog-rock sunrise and there’s another line here that I’m crazy about: “My lonely mile/ Is charming from above”. “Wings of Thorn” goes on for just over two minutes and then the dirge kicks in.
That’s “Car Language” and the horse is now a car and the open fields have become traffic. And that’s it. That’s the dream. “Car Language” is stretched out and menacing. It’s no pop song. It’s more like a high-tension section of a film score. This album is so busy that we need this dirge. Here and now. How many songs have we heard so far on this crazy album? Ten? Twenty? Who knows? (Okay, I know. It’s fourteen. “Car Language” is track 15.) Can we pause? Can we relax? Can we go for a drive?
Yep. And that’s why I like “Car Language”.
I have a real weakness for Pollard’s psychedelic side and that’s why “From a Voice Plantation” is another winner for me. The lead guitar in this two-minute wonder is straight out of San Francisco 1968 and Pollard’s song is beamed in straight from Mars. It’s exactly what I want to hear when I’m in this deep. Take me to other worlds, other places.
“The Ids Are Alright” is one last transitional track. Just over a minute long. “How did I get to know ya? How could I not?” Sounds like my relationship to GBV. The pun in the title is silly, but that’s the point. It lets out any remaining hot air. Guided by Voices are silly and it’s good to be silly.
“Universal Truths and Cycles” comes to blast us with one last pretty pop song before “Father Sgt. Christmas Card” sends us off.
I’m 44 years old and I think about death approximately 7,000 times a day. Robert Pollard was 44 years old when he made this album and he might have been in the same place. We’re at that age when guys just start dropping dead. Heart attack. Cancer. Pulmonary embolism. Whatever the fuck.
I’m fascinated by older men who are still going. They’re the real winners in life. I don’t care if he’s got millions in the bank or fifty bucks. I want to know what he’s doing.
“Father Sgt. Christmas Card” is Pollard’s ode to that guy. Old and gray and still out jogging and “gumming the fun tunnel” (I don’t think that I need to explain what that means). I always liked the song, but I didn’t really get it when I was 24.
Now I do.
The sleeve art for this one is a trip. It’s an homage to Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past. It’s supposed to look all fancy and shit. It’s meant to signify a new era.
And it did.