Tag: guided by voices

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #82: EARTHQUAKE GLUE

Guided by Voices
Earthquake Glue
2003, Matador Records

The back cover sums up Earthquake Glue for me.

On the surface, it’s a reluctant “band photo” for a group who prefer to not bother with those things on their records, but there’s more to it.

It’s a photo by Ana Luisa Morales in which the band are featureless stick figures far from the camera. What looks like a church-based charity storefront takes up much more space. An antique shop and a bingo hall sit under a sign that says “Horizon of Hope”. What we see of the parking lot is empty. The place is closed. Added color, drizzled on with the grace of blood stains, gives the impression on first glance that this is the middle of a desert. It looks like a dreamy nowhere.

It’s an image that says Why are we here?

Robert Pollard’s front cover collage has a similar effect, but the back cover is more blunt about it. It’s perfect for an album in which a band wrestles with their place in the universe.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #81: MY KIND OF SOLDIER

Guided by Voices
“My Kind of Soldier” b/w “Broken Brothers”
2003, The Fading Captain Series

At the start of 2003, Robert Pollard thought that the next Guided by Voices album, Earthquake Glue, was done.

It was recorded, nipped, tucked, polished and sequenced as a set of fourteen songs that starts quiet, ends with a rocker, and flies through a variety of moods in between. It was another one of those careful Pollard tracklists of hills and valleys and his ear for classic two-sided presentation. I don’t know what stage the sleeve art was in at this time, but the music at least was in the can. It was finished. Fin. Complete. The glue was dry.

And then Pollard wrote a new song afterward that he insisted had to go on it.

The band booked studio time in Chicago (I think they were in the city to play a show), banged out the song, and then Earthquake Glue had another track (and its first single) and it was called “My Kind of Soldier”.

Now the album was really done.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #76: THE PIPE DREAMS OF INSTANT PRINCE WHIPPET

Guided by Voices
The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet
2002, The Fading Captain Series

Were the nineteen songs of Universal Truths and Cycles not enough for you? Do you want more universal truths? Might you be interested in further cycles?

If so, Merry Christmas because this ten-song set of B-sides and castaways shortly followed the album. The band recorded a pile of songs while trying to figure out what the hell Universal Truths and Cycles was supposed to be. Going by this collection, they ruthlessly left off some punchy pop that didn’t fit on the LP’s sprawling trip.

Robert Pollard loves his contrasts and this record is less of a whirlwind than the album. It’s more blunt. It just rocks.

Even the title is a contrast.

Universal Truths and Cycles sounds big and important.

The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet conjures up a guy who’s having too much fun with cans of whipped cream. He has big thoughts himself though, and they’ll get even bigger with his next hit of nitrous oxide.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #75: UNIVERSAL TRUTHS AND CYCLES (the album)

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.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #74: UNIVERSAL TRUTHS AND CYCLES (the single)

Guided by Voices
“Universal Truths and Cycles” b/w “Beg for a Wheelbarrow”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

This is the fourth and final* 7″ teaser single released before the Universal Truths and Cycles album would hit the racks of your local Camelot Music in the summer of 2002 and it’s got the best B-side of the batch.

(*There were some European CD singles with repeated A-sides and that offered even more non-album tracks, but those can wait for a compilation EP that’s coming up soon.)

The flip here is called “Beg for a Wheelbarrow” and it’s a sinister beast meant for a band who can summon real thunder. It builds tension in an insistent post-punk march and then releases it in a haunting acapella section. Pollard’s words are about being broke, in debt and under the boot heel.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #73: EVERYWHERE WITH HELICOPTER

Guided by Voices
“Everywhere With Helicopter” b/w “Action Speaks Volumes”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

Rock is the word and the word is rock for this third 7″ on the ramp up to GBV’s indie rock homecoming album, Universal Truths and Cycles.

“Everywhere With Helicopter” is as commercial a single as Guided by Voices ever put out. Your average radio call-in contestant for Foo Fighters tickets in 2002 could easily get into its Nirvana-like kick. Meanwhile, Pollard’s melody ascends, descends, spins and attacks like an expertly flown Air Force jet maneuver. Every verse is a rocket that takes out a target.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #72: CHEYENNE

Guided by Voices
“Cheyenne” b/w “Visit This Place”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

“Cheyenne” is a song that only Robert Pollard would write. In the world of 2002, at least. That’s why it’s my favorite of the four Universal Truths and Cycles 7″ singles.

That said, it’s not any kind of left turn.

It’s made up of familiar pieces. It works on classic pop song machinery perfected long before Guided by Voices existed. “Cheyenne” is a product of the 1960s and of wearing out needles spinning piles of records by The Beatles and The Bee Gees (60s-era albums such as Idea and Odessa) and The Who over years and years.

It’s not the parts of “Cheyenne” that are so unique; no, it’s the way that they’re handled.

It’s like an artist’s line. You see an illustration and you instantly know who drew it. Only one person makes curves and crosshatches like that.

“Cheyenne” is about the mix of total pop with a curious dash of Pollard’s art-rock influences.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #71: BACK TO THE LAKE

Guided by Voices
“Back to the Lake” b/w “Dig Through My Window”
2002, The Fading Captain Series

The least controversial music news of 2002 was that Guided by Voices were back on Matador Records.

Everyone who cared was happy about it. Everyone knew that it was better this way. The prospect of a more free and spontaneous approach from the band was a welcome thing. The world needed a Guided by Voices who were under no pressure to achieve heavy radio rotation next to Puddle of Mudd.

The hits didn’t happen, but they got through the TVT era without becoming sellout jerks, which counts as a victory to me. Dignity was intact. Inspiration was running at a high. The band seemed to hardly take a breath between labels as they got to work on what I consider one of the very best albums to carry the Guided by Voices name, Universal Truths and Cycles.

But we can’t talk about that yet.

First we have to get into the whopping FOUR 7″ singles of preview tracks, released on The Fading Captain Series, because, hey, maybe the best way to hype an album is to make a big show of confidence like that rather than… whatever the hell TVT did.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #70: SOME OF THE MAGIC SYRUP WAS PRESERVED

Acid Ranch
Some of the Magic Syrup Was Preserved
2002, The Fading Captain Series

No one else in rock makes more colorful use of their unreleased archives than Robert Pollard, but then most musicians don’t share his collage artist sensibility.

The vastness of it all–thousands of songs on decades’ worth of tapes–helps, too. Throw in a powerful nostalgia for his own past, the hard-earned independence that allows him to put out whatever he wants and a segment of his audience who are always up for a trip, no matter how strange, through Pollard’s famous suitcase full of old cassettes and you get Some of the Magic Syrup Was Preserved.

The conventional way to release an album like this, a double LP of lo-fi cries in the night from two decades previous, is to present it as a row of tagged and bagged corpses. Cold specimens to study for your advanced degree in Pollardology. Call it something like Guided by Voices: The Early 1980s Tapes for a straightforward approach. Or, more wisely, maybe call it Robert Pollard, Jim Pollard, and Mitch Mitchell: Archival Basement Improvisations to temper expectations for the ragged ride ahead.

It should sound useful and not confusing, right?

WRONG, Pollard says here. That shit’s boring. Art doesn’t have to be useful–what is it, a spatula?–and it’s okay if it’s confusing. His eye and ear for presentation—enigmatic sleeve art, crazy track-lists, impeccable song sequencing–won’t let him treat his old tapes like museum pieces. No, he has to put a unique band name on them. Build a mystique around them. Make a living thing out of them. Otherwise, why bother?

Enter Acid Ranch, where Pollard gives body and breath to a strange early phase of his music circa 1981-82.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #69: CALLING ZERO

Go Back Snowball
Calling Zero
2002, The Fading Captain Series

I was born in 1976, which puts me at the perfect age to have been an insufferable indie rock dork in the 90s.

When I wasn’t in rock clubs with my arms folded, I was getting into serious discussions about whether or not Sonic Youth still “matter” and other fascinating topics (zzzzzzzzz…) like that. I also constantly needed to flex my music “knowledge”. All that I did was spend a little too much time at the record store, but I acted like I’d walked on the goddamn moon. I was a ball of insecurities and I had no good reason to be arrogant about anything, so I filled that vacant space with my super-awesome music opinions. I thought that I had shocking and unique views. Now I’m cool and I have something to say. 

Why couldn’t I just be a human being? Why did I have something to prove all of the time?

Eh, youth. The only thing that I miss about it is being able to eat a whole pizza and not feel like shit for the rest of the day.

I’m not saying that everyone who was into indie rock at the time shared my malfunctions. I’m also not putting down the music itself. 90s indie rock was a good thing that revealed possibilities and expanded horizons. People had great times with that music.

Some of it even holds up, though there’s so much that I can’t listen to anymore without recalling what a Cringe Machine I was. It was a full-time job for me back then.  It kept me so occupied that I didn’t have any time to get into Superchunk.

Maybe I just haven’t heard the right songs. Maybe I haven’t given enough time to what I have heard. Maybe it’s because Superchunk never, to my battered memory, played North Texas during the peak of my live show-going (1996 to 2000), Maybe I’m a giant idiot (always and forever a possibility).

And this is how I approach this lovely record by Go Back Snowball, an album that follows Life Starts Here like spring follows winter.

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