Robert Pollard – Memphis Flyer

Whether a new Guided By Voices album is newsworthy depends on the state of your fandom. They’re one of the most prolific bands of the 90s and beyond, with 24 full-length albums under the GBV name, and even more under the name of principal songwriter Robert Pollard; so does the release of their 25th merit hoopla? That depends on your love of the unpredictable twists and turns of Pollard’s songwriting – and Memphis has many fans. While you may still be absorbed with April’s double album August by Cake, today sees the release of yet more pop sonic experiments from the band, How Do You Spell Heaven?

This newest platter offers much of what GBV fans are after, in a form more concise and disciplined than this spring’s release. While I have a weakness for their earliest lo-fi ventures, they abandoned those tones 20 years ago when a revamped lineup of the band took on a more produced sound. The crunchy guitars, bizarre chord changes, and out-of-nowhere sonic flares remained, though. For some, it was more powerful than ever on the technicolor soundstage of a major studio recording. Heaven carries on that tradition, where the puzzling meets the polished, but with a more pronounced intimacy and vulnerability.

Part of the enigmatic quality comes from Pollard’s delivery of his oblique lyrics as if his life depended on it. To be sure, GBV’s songs require repeated listenings to digest. The title song is classic Pollard: “The first hand offers the hand, the first hand! The second hand offers the hand, the second hand! … Information machines closing the casket. How do you spell heaven? Is bookshelf one word?” Inquiring minds want to know.

It really comes down to Pollard’s compelling delivery, tacking between the wistful and the desperate. And in a sonic palette where anything goes, the oblique lyrics make sense. It’s a postmodern world of disconnected meaning, re-contextualized observations. At any moment, the rug may get pulled out from under you. “How to Murder a Man (In 3 Acts)” may open up with a single chugging guitar, riffing menacingly, but just where you expect a big drum intro to kick off the song proper, it goes moody, as Pollard intones, “the counterculture is soaking/We cannot be held responsible.” Okay…color me intrigued. Then the song proceeds to explode, stylistically landing on several planets at once..

Guided By Voices: How Do You Spell Heaven?

Grounding the proceedings are far-reaching musical allusions growing out of the tradition of power pop. While the experimental side is never far, neither are the melodies, weaving textures, and even acoustic balladeering of classic rock from the 70s through the 90s. These are finely crafted musings, played with the assurance of a lifer who lives and breathes the history of radio. If calling it “pop” is too generalist and vague for these peculiar song-poems, perhaps “odd-pop” captures the balance struck here, between the accessible and the idiosyncratic, the gut and the dreaming brain.
**** (4 stars)

A rock critic, college-radio programmer, and independent record-store owner walk into a bar during the last week of December 1986. Reflecting on the year in music, they discuss Sonic Youth’s first album for SST (Evol), Hüsker Dü’s move to Warner Bros. and how Candy Apple Grey didn’t suck like they’d expected, the breakup of Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys’ last show and legal wrangling with the PMRC, Slayer’s Reign in Blood and Metallica’s Master of Puppets admittedly being sort of awesome but not as awesome as Big Black’s Atomizer, that new Scottish pop band the Vaselines, and why on earth the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland.

Then the rock critic recalls a recent trip to visit his aunt in Dayton, where his cousin had this weird EP by a local band called Guided By Voices. “The songs are catchy but might have been recorded into a boom box sitting eight rooms away, and there was only a handful pressed up,” he says, prompting the store owner to comment, “That sounds like a one-way ticket to obscurity.”

Or not. When Guided By Voices “released” the Forever Since Breakfast EP in the summer of 1986, principal songwriter and bandleader Robert Pollard, then 28 years old, utilized the “friends and family” style of distribution while making his living as a grade-school teacher. Today, bands, side projects, one-offs, full-length albums, EPs, DVDs, box sets, seven-inch singles, and even books make up Pollard’s complete artistic portfolio — an impenetrable maze that’s been totally consumed, memorized, and understood only by the most dedicated of super-fans. Pollard has over 1,000 songs registered with B.M.I., and most of his creative output has occurred in the past 15 years.

Guided By Voices was certainly Pollard’s main concern until the group officially disbanded at the end of 2004. About a third of the way in, ’92-’95, Guided By Voices found themselves the darlings of the independent rock scene. Their apparently bottomless pit of foggy, scratchy, and genuinely crappy-sounding pop songs had hooks so golden one would swear they’d heard them before, as if ripped off from more famous pop geniuses of the ’60s and ’70s, but it was just the result of Pollard’s intimidating chops. Guided By Voices was also inadvertently lumped into a particular indie-rock movement by the music press, all due to the low-fidelity of the recordings.

A quote: “Various recording techniques have always alternated in and out of style throughout modern music, and sooner or later, things need to be shaken up. Well, right now in the punk rock world, ‘lo-fi’ is all the rage. There are hordes of new bands embracing and pushing the limits of this sound to fresh heights.”

Amazingly, these words did not introduce a feature in an early-’90s issue of The New York Times, Rolling Stone, or The Village Voice. Nor are they in reference to Pavement, Sebadoh, the Grifters, Smog, Guided By Voices, or a horde of other bands from the period. These words were spoken at the beginning of an MTV.com news segment that aired earlier this year — a maddeningly out-of-touch, attempted summation of such disparately motivated bands as Times New Viking, Psychedelic Horseshit, No Age, TyVek, and Memphis’ own Jay Reatard. It is cringe-inducing that rock critics and a (hopefully) small number of young bands are trying to sell the idea that lo-fi, off-kilter, or experimental indie pop and rock is something new to this half of the decade, opting for an oblivious, proprietary arrogance regarding a style that never went away but simply emerged from remission.

Yet it appears that a comforting degree of bands realize they owe a stunning debt to Pollard, and, as such, he’s become a sort of unwitting patriarch to a media-generated movement — not to imply that Pollard has dozed through one day of the last 10 years. Through side-project-gone-proper bands such as the Circus Devils, Pollard’s knack for challenging, noise-damaged pop remains solid. When he turns 51 this Halloween, Pollard’s musical projects will number in the neighborhood of 35 to 40. The latest is Boston Spaceships, which teams Pollard with Chris Slusarenko and John Moen (day job: Decemberists drummer).

The unfortunately titled Brown Submarine is the first album on which Pollard has exhumed some marginalia from his monumental back-catalog, reworking the tracks before applying a polish via full band. Brown Submarine recalls the relatively big-production Guided By Voices of ’99-’02.

Truthfully, this might be the halfway point of Pollard’s musical odyssey. When he turns 71 in 2028, if he’s not using pop songs to stop a rapidly spreading virus or post-apocalyptic outbreak of giant killer sparrows, there’s a strong chance that his 172nd band will have just released an album of material superior to that of outfits one-third his age. Pollard is a one-of-a-kind artist who remains as relevant as ever, avoiding obscurity by the sheer volume of what he creates while focusing on one or two primary projects. A special note: Tommy Keene, accomplished and legendary among the power-pop community, was recruited as guitarist for the touring version of Boston Spaceships.