REVIEWS:
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(reviewed by Joe Friesen)
There's a lot of reasons to dislike this album. It's about as unprofessionally produced as any "canonical" rock album ever, with tape hissing all over the place and guitar solos suddenly disappearing (Yep, about a minute and a half into 'Hardcore UFOs', the guitar in the left speaker goes out for two seconds). Also, this is essentially a power-POP album, but I've never heard of a pop album as self-consciously messy and grungy as this one. The closest comparison I can think of would be Nirvana's Nevermind, but while that album had a whole lotta fantastic pop hooks wrapped up in grungy, Pixies-esque aesthetics, the whole thing still had a squeaky-clean feel to it that made it an acceptable pop album for the masses, and Bee Thousand could hardly be described as squeaky-clean. And, though I hate to say it, Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout are not the greatest singers in the world; they evoke an "Average Joe-turned Rock Star" vibe, which is kinda the band's whole point, but great singers they are not. That said, this is easily one of the best pop albums I've ever heard, and I adore it as much as any other album to come out in the nineties.
Don't get me wrong, though. I'm not gonna make any asinine, Pitchforkian claims like "out of 20 tracks, there's not one that's flawed in any way," (yes, thanks for the obnoxious hyperbole, Ryan). Hell, I've listened to it countless times,and there are still a few tracks in the second half that make absolutely no impression on me at all. But I'm still willing to get in line to claim this as Robert Pollard's masterpiece and one of the great albums of the nineties because the kind of idiosyncratic magic that Pollard comes up with here is something he never managed to replicate. The plaintive 1:15 of "Yours to Keep" erupts into the bubble-gummy British Invasion rock of "Echos Myron", which then degenerates into the ugly but tons-of-fun indie-drone of "Gold Star For Robot Boy". That kind of playfulness, Robert Pollard's willingness to try out different styles yet still manage a great sense of cohesiveness is what makes Robert Pollard such an endearing songwriter.
And, jeez, does his songwriting ever work on this album! To me, this is the ultimate expression of Robert Pollard - Garage/Arena rocker. Playing with that unique dualism of Rock 'n' Roll Superstar and DIY Indie Everyman, Pollard plows through 20 songs (yes, 20 songs on a 36 minute-and-change album, tis the magic of GBV) of generally very high quality, all the while reconciling the immeasurablegap between Pete Townshend-esque arena-rock wildman and understated recorded-in-a-living-room graceful rock reminiscent of the Velvet Underground's third album. That he manages to do this so well, and do it with some of the coolest, catchiestpop-nuggets this side of, well, the Nuggets boxset, is why I can easily count this as the band's creative peak, even though I know it's getting to be cliched and passe to do so. THE HELL WITH IT! I can't help it if this is the GBV album I enjoy the most! =]
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(reviewed by Joe Friesen)
Oh goodness, this would be the album where Pollard's musical ADD gets WAY out of control. Forty minutes long, TWENTY-EIGHT freakin' songs. Only six of them even crack the two-minute barrier. When they finally get around to "Alright", at 2:55 it feels like the album's superlong extended jam session ala "Reoccuring Dreams" on Zen Arcade. Again, I hate to conform to popular critical opinion, but someone really needed to sit Pollard down (and Tobin Sprout, can't forget about him) and force him to further develop his great ideas and just forget about the less inspired ones.
But then, if someone did that, all we'd have is Bee Thousand-redux. What we do have is Alien Lanes, a wholly unique listening experience, if not a total unqualified artistic success. With 28 tracks, with so many ideas flying by, it's easy to be intimidated on first listen. And unlike Bee Thousand, there isn't much to distinguish one song from another; they don't stray much from that slightly uptempo vaguely punkish rhythm andthey don't mix up the guitar tone or instrumentation too much except for a fun bit of violin in "Blimpe Go 90", so that first listen will reveal a pretty monotonous though occasionally striking lo-fi indie pop record. But like most great Guided By Voices material, repeated listens will slowly reveal the unique magic this music has to offer. You start to notice a nice bit of vocal harmony here or there, a melody you considered pedestrian at first suddenly catches your ear--THEN of course as soon as you notice that, then song ends and you get thrown into a formless, dissonant piece of suck, but thus is the fun of Guided By Voices--you know that piece of suck won't last long, and if you apply yourself, you might learn to appreciate it.
I think it's also crucial to mention the importance of Tobin Sprout, the Harrison to Pollard's Lennon/McCartney. In my Bee Thousand review I barely even mentioned him, if I even did at all, but the truth is that on any given GBV album with him in the lineup, his songs can easily go toe to toe with Pollard's best. Though I neglected to mention it in Bee Thousand, "Smothered in Hugs" and "Mincer Ray" are among the finest songs on the album--they just unfortunately get lost in the shuffle with the half-dozen immortal Pollard classics ("Smothered in Hugs" is also good because it shows that sometimes letting your song go on for an interminable THREE minutes can be a good thing, because it lets the great verses build to the soaring hook... take note, Bob!). The same goes for this album with the classic "A Good Flying Bird", one of my favorite GBV songs; its driving, rhythmic guitar chords drive the song forward with a beautiful punk energy, and his reciting of the hook followed by the shout of "YEAH! YEAH!" is 2 kewl 4 skewl--though I still think his voice isn't technically great at all, he has that great high-pitched Wayne Coyne charm that helps me fall in love with songs like this even more. I just wish that the ugly, schizophrenic minute of "Cigarette Tricks" and "Pimple Zoo" could've been used to beef up the 1:07 runtime of "A Good Flying Bird".
But while Harrison's contributions were nice, we can't forget that it was Lennon and McCartney that brought us to the dance. Though Pollard is guilty of his fair share of missteps, he's also guilty of being one hell of an indie-popmeister. My personal favorite at the moment is "My Valuable Hunting Knife", two minutes of hyper-fun, rockin' goodness, starting off with a great bassline that keeps on chooglin' (that wacky Tobin guy again!) that gets greeted with the screechy, trebly guitar in the right. The bass and guitar playing off each other in fun ways like on that song, all with an insanely vocal melody over the top of it, that to me is what makes a great GBV song (actually, that's probably the very basic element that makes just about ANY rock song good, but we'll ignore that). And Bob's playfulness comes through yet again, with the basic, bouncy melody, the improvised-sounding "I will I will yeah yeah yeah" stuff and the "HIT IT!" that greets the entry of the guitar. FUN!
Basically... give this one a shot. In terms of quantifying the merits of the album, it's probably just another ho-hum great effort from Guided By Voices. What doesn't come through in pure number ratings is that this is easily the most wildly schizophrenic album they ever did, which is saying a lot. And its a fun schizophrenia, not the dark and intensely creepy schizophrenia of Can's best work. In terms of quality, it's no Bee Thousand, but, jeez, there's only one Bee Thousand, it's hardly the most appropriate measuring stick. I'll give it a very strong 8.5, which could easily be bumped up to a 9 or even 9.5 on a good day, but there's just too much wacky dissonance for me to rate it any higher ("Ex-Supermodel", anybody? Good lord, WHYYYYY do they overlay some awful snoring sound over that track? I have to skip it every time!)
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(reviewed by Joe Friesen)
Here is the point where the critical community and Guided By Voices fanboys start to diverge. While pretty much everyone is ready to sing the praises of the two previous albums, most critics start to tune out starting here, leaving goofs like me that dig nearly every album Guided By Voices put out to listen to the rest of their output in peace. This is also the first GBV album recorded in a legit recording studio with a real producer overseeing the recordings, Pixies' bassist Kim Deal and veteran indie studio wiz kid Steve Albini. Bob Pollard and Company have finally decided to leave the messy DIY aesthetic behind in favor of something resembling professionalism (strange that once they leave behind the rawer indie sound, Pitchfork decides to leave them behind--in both Best of the 90's lists they did, Alien Lanes and Bee Thousand rank highly, while this one is nowhere in sight. Sorry to bring them up again, but I can't resist the occasional Pitchfork jab, even though I'm guilty of reading them just like anyone else).
Cramming the guys into a recording studio naturally brought about a major change in their sound, though not as big of a change as you might think. The sound is fuller, the guitars sound crisper, cleaner, better defined, and more aggressive than ever, and they also change up their tone more often than before. They also beef up the sound using strong guitar recordings mixed high instead of just making them real screechy and feedbacky. And Pollard has reigned in his musical ADD-induced eccentricities; this album features 24 tracks with a total running time of 55:48 and an average song length of 2:20. Nobody could accuse this album of being long-winded, but compare that to the 28 tracks, 40:57 long, 1:28 average of Alien Lanes! Ha! So what we get is a solidly produced, professional sounding album. But part of what made the two previous efforts so great was the self-conscious messiness of it all, so the question is, does the superglossy sheen kill the whimsical magic? Unfortunately, to a certain extent, it does. But what it lacks in whimsy it more than makes up for in focus; the group was clearly interested in coming up with great ideas and refining them into real SONGS, as opposed to just coming up with great ideas and recording them as half-baked little song snippets. No eighteen second clips of unlistenable noise, just twenty-four solid, fully formed songs.
Of course, all this talk about the presentation of the album is pretty darned meaningless--what really counts is the quality of those twenty-four songs, and I'm pleased to say that (forgive the cumbersome analogy) Pollard and Sprout brought their 'A' game to these recording sessions, as opposed to their 'A+ at times, but mostly B or C' game they sported on Alien Lanes. Most GBV albums are about naming the highlights, but this is probably the most remarkably consistent offering of their catlogue, even beating out Bee Thousand in that respect. One of my favorites right now is "The Official Ironmen Rally Song", which starts out a bit sluggish, but picks up when it gets to the wonderful, rousing chorus, and I also really did the dark, snarling guitar phrasing that degenerates into a beast of a solo a few times throughout the song. Also cool is "Your Name Is Wild"; the melody is striking, the guitar tone is vicious... everything that makes the album so good is encapsulated in that one song. And, lest you forget about everyone's second-favorite Guided By Voices songwriter, Tobin Sprout chimes in with four typically brilliant songs, one of which, "It's Like Soul Man", sports that cool, muted, amateurish sound they had on the previous two albums.
Really, I don't think there's a truly bad song on here. There are some that don't engage me nearly as much as others, but that's to be expected when dealing with a 24 song album. The only complaints I have against it would be that it seems to suppress the band's personality just a wee bit too much, and the sound in general seems a bit derivative of The Pixies, though I think I'm willing to lame blame for that on Albini and Kim Deal. But the cleaned up sound gives the album a cogency and consistency they've never been able to match. Seventy million billion thumbs up.
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(reviewed by Joe Friesen)
I guess if one were to nail down the "classic" period of Guided By Voices music, it would start with Bee Thousand and end with Under The Bushes Under the Stars. After the last album, Bob and Tobin had a bit of a falling out, leading Bob to more or less fire the rest of his bandmates, making the tight, polished indie-rock outfit Cobra Verde, led by guitarist Doug Gillard, his new backing band. Tobin's songwriting and underrated bass acumen will certainly be missed, but I personally see this move as a net gain for the group. Before, the group only seemed capable of the producing the laid-back garage-rock vibe that characterized the last three albums -- Under the Bushes... sees Albini and Kim Deal attempt to morph the band into a garagey 90's Pixies band, but the effect is still basically the same (not to knock that sound, they pounded out three of my favorite albums riding just that one sound). With a more (I hate to use the word again) professional (d'oh) crew behind him, for the first time Pollard is able to achieve all kinds of different tones for his music, and what we get is the first GBV album that is both visceral and aggressive while still retaining the playfulness of Pollard's songwriting.
And, as we all know, Robert Pollard can't NOT write great songs. He doesn't have it in him. So, predictably, Mag Earwhig! is yet another collection of absolute classics, lots of perfectly acceptable indie-rockers, and two or three real drags -- all of which are rendered just a bit more interesting with this new visceral/playful approach. Hmmm... though, really, the only song I see as a total drag is "The Old Grunt", and, though it's hardly a great song, the only reason I think it might be a drag is because of its unfortunate placement between "I am a Tree" and "Bulldog Skin", the two best, most energetic and hooky and wonderful songs on the album. I'm all amped up after soaking in the riffy goodness and sweetly poetic lyrics of "I am a Tree", I know I've got the soaring hook from "Bulldog Skin" waiting for me... I can't help skipping "The Old Grunt", in all its flaccid, hookless mediocrity.
Speaking of "Bulldog Skin"... could any song more aptly exemplify the utter COOLNESS of GBV v3.0? If it's recorded with the old band and stuck on, oh, say, Alien Lanes, the chorus alone makes it a highlight. Here, it's hooky, crunchy, and features a guitar solo halfway into it that's every bit as captivating as the incredible chorus. Another song in a similar vein is another personal favorite of mine, "Portable Men's Society", which is downright creepy, with the high-pitched screeching, dark, low-end guitar riffs and hard, stomping drum beat.
Pollard has always been an emotionally dynamic songwriter, and now that he finally has the capability to produce music that can effectively keep up with the shifts in tone he creates from song to song, he's finally able to create an album that puts his unique talents on display like no other before or since. From a pure songwriting standpoint, Bee Thousand packs a punch that this or any other indie-rock album couldn't hope to match, and it fully deserves the highest possible rating, but it is on Mag Earwhig that Bob's potential is most perfectly fleshed out.
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