Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Guided by Voices

A Tuesday morning planning lessons and listening to songs from this wonderful band. I'm on a tea break now. So here's a Guardian article detailing their latest split and choosing a few tracks from a band that just spat them out!

Guided by Voices: how do you pick their five best songs?

The insanely productive lo-fi heroes from Ohio have split, again. To mark their passing, we’ve selected five tracks that fit different categories of ‘best’

Michael Hann

So farewell then, again, Guided by Voices. The Dayton, Ohio, band have announced their second split. “Guided by Voices has come to an end,” they posted on their website. “With 4 years of great shows and six killer albums, it was a hell of a comeback run. The remaining shows in the next two months are unfortunately canceled. Our sincere apologies to those that have purchased tickets and made travel plans. Thanks to everyone who has supported GBV.”
Of course, it wasn’t the first time GBV have fallen apart. In 1997, leader Robert Pollard replaced the entire line-up with a new set of musicians. He did the same, keeping only one member, a year later. And the band folded completely for the first time in 2004. Now, alas, it appears the wildly overproductive kings of lo-fi are gone forever. Without having returned to the UK in this second life (boo! Hiss!).
So here we celebrate their life with a definitive list of the best GBV songs, which clearly isn’t definitive at all, but pretty random. Because rather than picking the most tuneful songs, we’ve tried to represent the full spectrum of Pollard and co by picking different categories of best …

The best song title

So many contenders! The Ids are Alright, The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet, Titus and Strident Wet Nurse (Creating Jeffrey), Unleashed! The Large Hearted Boy, and so many more. Every GBV song title speaks to Robert Pollard’s love of words and the way they sound, and no matter how random his titles might appear they often convey vivid, if disturbing images: a Leprechaun Catfish Fighter, anyone? But our winner is one that captures both GBV’s whimsy and the sense of disjuncture from the world: Everyone Thinks I’m a Raincloud (When I’m Not Looking), from the 2004 album Half Smiles of the Decomposed.

The best alcohol song

GBV onstage were a festival of booze. They would have a bathtub filled with cans of beer from which to help themselves. On their final US tour in 2004, buckets labelled “piss” and “puke” were left on stage so members could get through the three-hour plus sets without having to leave the stage (though on the night I saw that tour, no one had to use either). On I Am a Tree, from the album Mag Earwhig!, Pollard is audibly slurring his words – on one of the band’s best and best loved songs (even though it wasn’t actually their own: it had been brought from an earlier band of his called the Mice by guitarist Doug Gillard). But Pollard’s drinking did cause some observers to express concern for his wellbeing, and he responded to one reviewer who’d noted with slight horror the amount of beer onstage with a short song on the 2000 album Isolation Drills, called How’s My Drinking: “How’s my drinking?/ I don’t care about being sober/ But I sure get around/ In this town.” Typically, the throwaway lyric was set to a gorgeous, mid-paced swelling ballad. Pollard actually pissed away the melody.

The best opening lines

There are many, but the perfect combination of GBV’s many virtues comes at the beginning of Hardcore UFOs, one of their anthems, in which the merits of hanging around home (which is what GBV did for their first five albums), the awesome power of rock’n’roll and the weirdness of the world are brought together: “Sitting out on your house/ Watching hardcore UFOs/ Drawing pictures, playing solos til 10/ Are you amplified to rock?/ Are you hoping for a contact?/ I’ll be with you, without you, again.” No idea how or why that manages to be moving, but it is. GBV were kings of the indefinable.

The best personal song

Pollard’s abstruse writing style means looking for clues to his life in his songs is usually a fool’s errand. But sometimes the truth glimmers through, as it does on Game of Pricks – the best song on the best GBV album, Alien Lanes, and therefore possibly the best GBV song. Pollard had recently got divorced, and Game of Pricks reflected on the unpleasant and chastening experience over one of the band’s most uplifting riffs – though how “I’ve cheated so long, I wonder/ How you keep track of me” squares with “And I’ve never asked for the truth/ But you owe that to me.”

The best Beatles pastiche

It’s both the great frustration and joy of GBV that even when they were crap, they could be brilliant, and vice versa. An album of brilliant pop songs could suddenly be derailed by some throwaway skronk; an album of unlistenable crap would suddenly throw forth something that sounded like it should have been a radio staple for decades. Equally, the brilliant songs would sometimes cut short just when you had a taste for them, but long before they’d satisfied your appetite. Long Distance Man comes from the second GBV album, 1987’s Sandbox – when they were still recording at home and putting out their albums themselves to family and friends – is one such. It’s 77 seconds song, and it sounds like it should have been on Rubber Soul.

It starts with a birthstone...