Category: music

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #33: JELLYFISH REFLECTOR

Guided by Voices
Jellyfish Reflector
1996, no label

I don’t know exactly when this double live LP came out, so I’ll slide it in at the end of the year like I’ve done for most of the others. As with the band’s previous pseudo bootlegs, this didn’t have a formal release date. It wasn’t announced. It just appeared in the racks one day at some of your better vinyl-friendly record stores.

All I know for sure is that I bought it at Bill’s Records and Tapes in Richardson, TX in the summer of 1997 and that it blew my mind about a thousand feet skyward.

This was the first time that I ever heard how Guided by Voices sounded live.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #32: TONICS & TWISTED CHASERS

A rare CD photo in this series

Guided by Voices
Tonics & Twisted Chasers
1996, Rockathon Records

In 1996, we thought that two albums, two EPs and a couple of singles from Robert Pollard in one year was a lot.

We were so innocent back then.

It was a year in which Guided by Voices ran Matador through their paces and released so many records that it became an issue for some people. The “Bob Pollard needs an editor” cliche started up around this time. Critics were running out of things to say about the band and ho-hum’d their way through reviews. I still remember a guy in my dorm in ’96 who said “I liked Guided by Voices for awhile and then Pollard got musical diarrhea”.

And it was in this climate that GBV put out ONE MORE FUCKING ALBUM at the tail end of the year.

The way I remember it, it was a surprise release. No ramp-up. It just showed up one day for sale on their website, announced first through their e-mail list. Mailorder only. Vinyl only. 1,000 copies in a variety of colors. Nothing that would compete for rack space with their other releases (and, thus, not annoy the Matador folks). The artwork was a crude black-and-white photocopy of the Sunfish Holy Breakfast cover photo pasted onto a plain white sleeve. The band put it out themselves just like the old days. The aesthetic was the pseudo-“bootleg” style that they used for live albums such as For All Good Kids, but this time it was an LP of nineteen new songs.

As for the music, Tonics & Twisted Chasers is the sweetly weird work of savages who never sleep. It’s a pile of lo-fi nutcase stuff that stands apart from the year’s other LPs.

It plays like Under the Bushes Under the Stars was a dream that never really happened.

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Things I Will Keep #14: THE MONKEES, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.

The Monkees
Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. LP
1967, Colgems

Guilty pleasures are the best. I love everything about guilty pleasures. That’s why I have about 9,000 of them. Meanwhile, some others outright hate the very expression. “Why should I feel guilty about the things I like?” goes the usual argument. They seem to interpret it as a feeling of shame and ostracism, best avoided. In spirit, I agree, but I still think these people are all mixed up.

Guilt is an exciting emotion and I prefer to savor it.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #31: PLANTATIONS OF PALE PINK

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.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #30: SUNFISH HOLY BREAKFAST

Guided by Voices
Sunfish Holy Breakfast
1996, Matador Records

In 1996, Matador Records indulged Robert Pollard’s madcap work ethic. Yes, they passed on the weird solo acoustic EP that he offered them (which Pollard then merely stuck to the end of his Not in My Airforce album), but they went along with plenty of other madness, bless ’em.

When Pollard pulled the plug on GBV’s The Flying Party is Here LP at the last minute, just as it was being prepared to go to press, in favor of a new set of songs that he preferred (and which turned out to be Under the Bushes Under the Stars), Matador were cool with it.

Six months after the new GBV album, they put out Pollard’s first solo album.

Two months after that, in November, they also released a pair of Guided by Voices EPs on the same day. They were two oddballs that didn’t do much for the “Pollard needs an editor” crowd, but if you’d been bitten by the bug, they were sweet stuff full of those warm and familiar basement vibes.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #29: NOT IN MY AIRFORCE

Robert Pollard
Not in My Airforce
1996, Matador Records

I can tell you exactly when I went from being a casual toe-dipper fan of Robert Pollard’s music to being the mental case presently on display before you.

It was in the fall of 1996 when I got hooked big time on Pollard’s whale of a first solo album, Not in My Airforce. 

This record kept me up nights, was a constant companion and it still feels like a part of me nearly twenty-five years later. I sank deep into my headphones for this one. For years, I considered it my favorite Pollard record of all, GBV or otherwise.

So, what’s the difference between Guided by Voices and a Pollard solo album?

In 1996, not a whole hell of a lot.

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Things I Will Keep #13: TOBIN SPROUT, Carnival Boy

Tobin Sprout
Carnival Boy
1996, Matador Records

I’m one of those goofballs whose favorite Beatle is George. Also, my favorite Beatle solo album of the early years after the big break-up is Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. Sure, it’s not perfect. It’s a triple-album set and, like most people of good stock, I ignore the “Apple Jam” instrumental garbage on the third LP. And “I Dig Love” might be the worst song ever written. And I don’t know why the hell Harrison figured that we need two versions of “Isn’t It a Pity?”.

The headline though is that it’s the work of the underdog guy in the band now doing his own thing and killing it. The highs of All Things Must Pass reach such peaks that they can lead a guy to forget the low points.

One also imagines that All Things Must Pass is a stockpile of songs that got left off of Beatles records. Great stuff that might have fit right in, but never got the chance.

That’s part of the appeal of Tobin Sprout’s first solo LP outside of Guided by Voices, but with a difference.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #28: CUT-OUT WITCH

Guided by Voices
Cut-Out Witch
1996, Matador Records

The only Guided by Voices picture disc, as of this writing, and like most picture discs, it’s inessential. Audio dorks say that they inherently have worse sound quality than regular records, but a slob like me wouldn’t know anything about that. This one sounds fine, I guess.

But it is pretty much a trinket, a bauble. Something for the nerds. If you have this, you’re a nerd.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the music on it (in my nerd opinion, at least). On the A-side are two fine album tracks from Under the Bushes Under the Stars and the B-side offers two fine performances live in the studio for WHFS in Washington DC for rock critic Dave Marsh’s “Inside Dave’s Garage” radio show, recorded in August 1995.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #27: UNDER THE BUSHES UNDER THE STARS

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.

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Things I Will Keep #12: TANGERINE DREAM, Thief (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Tangerine Dream
THIEF
1981, Elektra/Asylum

When director Michael Mann decided that his first feature would be the story of a burned-out career criminal on the mean streets of Chicago, he somehow figured that German progressive instrumental group Tangerine Dream were the perfect ones to score it.

Thief is a story that we’ve seen before. Chicago is a setting that we’ve seen before. But this time, it was going to be a bleak, but day-glo, dream in a luminous night world and a new take on noir for the 1980s.  It would be gritty and grimy, but also oddly beautiful. Its style wouldn’t be outlandish; rather, it would be a kind of hyper-reality. Every last light bulb and every shadow would be as vital as the pages of the script.

And it would all move to the zero-gravity swirl of Edgar Froese and company’s synthesizers.

It’s been a controversial decision ever since.

The Golden Raspberry Awards (the informal, smarmy anti-Oscars) nominated it as the Worst Music Score of 1981.

Even Michael Mann himself has said in recent years that he’s still not sure if he made the right choice when it came to the music (see the supplements on the Criterion Collection disc of the film).

Meanwhile, here I am still taking this album’s ride in 2019 to places far out where none of that matters.

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