Matador Records | Guided By Voices Biography

Here is the last Guided By Voices album. Not in the sense of "Here is the previous Guided By Voices album," but in the sense of "final." If it’s true in movies where the voice-over says "You never really appreciate something until it’s gone," and the credits roll, and you leave the theater with little bits of popcorn stuck to your shoes, then you will soon appreciate Guided By Voices. Because following this album and its ensuing tour, the band will be gone. After twenty-odd years, twenty-odd lineups, and twenty-odd albums, EPs, singles, triples, stolen bases, misdemeanor convictions, and broken hearts, Dayton, OH’s fortunate sons are taking leave of your senses.

"This feels like the last album for Guided By Voices," explains Robert Pollard, known to his friends as "Robert Pollard," GBV’s lone constant member, lead singer, and famously prolific songwriter. "I’ve always said that when I make a record that I’m totally satisfied with as befitting a final album, then that will be it. And this is it."

This, entitled 'Half Smiles Of The Decomposed' (a line from the album’s terrific second song, "Sleepover Jack"), may well be the strongest set of music the band has ever released for public consumption, but to be honest, we’re a little tired of saying that every time GBV puts out a new record. The truth loses its power of affect with repetition, apparently. There’s only so many times you can play people a song like "Girls Of Wild Strawberries," for instance, drawing attention to its deceptively simple structure, influenced at the same time by both American and British veins of mid-60s chime-pop, pointing out the intricate interweaving guitar lines, the stunning word-play, the vastly melancholic and somehow still uplifting tone, the impeccably tossed-off phrasing, hell, even the stately, plump rhythm section, only to have these same (ordinarily intelligent and open-minded) people whine "I liked their earlier, funnier stuff," before you want to beat your head against the side of Dayton’s Canal Street Tavern. Which is made of brick.

"Some people have said our albums have gotten progressively weaker since, say, 'Under The Bushes, Under The Stars' [Matador, 1995]," says Pollard. "But actually they’re misinterpreting a common human tendency to grow tired of something if it hangs around too long." Now, we’d debate his notion that GBV has hung around too long, especially when there’s so many other, better examples of bands hanging around too long on current display, but we’d rather spend our time explaining, quickly, that Pollard himself is not going to stop writing or recording or touring. Well, maybe touring. He intends to continue as a solo artist: some of you in the audience may be asking how that’s any different from continuing as Guided By Voices, since "we all know" that GBV’s more or less Pollard’s show anyway. If he’s sick of the band, why doesn’t he do what he always does and fire the band, then reconstitute with former members of Skunk and Warthog and The Sweaty Three?
Thing is, he’s not sick of the band, he’s sick of the baggage. "I love the guys in the band, but I’m getting too old to be a gang leader," he explains. "There’s a sense of maturity, and even integrity, I think, in continuing as one’s own self, instead of as a gang — albeit a positive and productive one."

You can hear that maturity, and we’re pretty sure integrity, on 'Half Smiles Of The Decomposed,' whose experiments with textures and effects expand on similar moves made by 2003’s 'Earthquake Glue,' possibly due to being recorded with the same producer (Todd Tobias, once again turning in a strong effort. Good job, Todd!). 'HSOTD' occupies a happy mid-point on the recording fidelity spectrum, or would if such a thing existed, and has an easy-going feel that belies its twisty maze of puns and alliterative allusions, nimble guitar lines, and genre-melding song structures. In other words, it’s another dazzling jewel in a catalog studded with equally shiny gems (Did you know Dayton’s nickname is the Gem City? Maybe it’s just a coincidence).

But in Pollard’s view the Guided By Voices experience has become overly-received, in the sense that he feels constricted by the need to deliver an album that sounds like what he thinks we mean when we say, "Here’s the new Guided By Voices album."

Or like he says: "I need to get back to a lack of professionalism where there’s a certain degree of awkwardness. In order for that to happen, I need to become much more actively involved in the studio." Meaning not that he wants to play all the instruments himself, though he could, but that he wants to play with anyone he wants, a whole bunch of different people even, over the course of a particular album, without having to worry about leaving space for a certain number or type of guitar parts or bass lines or what-have-yous. Also: leaving GBV behind, he feels, will allow him to concentrate more on the creative side of things and not concern himself with business aspects like promotion and sticking to a heavy touring schedule.

And we wish him the best of luck. And we can’t wait to hear what he comes up with next. And so on. But in the meantime, you actually can hear what he’s come up with next, in the form of 'Half Smiles Of The Decomposed,' the last best shot from a band that has given us nothing but bull’s-eyes for longer than we have deserved. Listen to this: it will never happen again.

Robert Pollard – vocals
Doug Gillard – guitar
Nate Farley – guitar
Chris Slusarenko – bass
Kevin March – drums

Wow. Guided By Voices have created a goddamn monster of platonic-form-telepathy. The latest combination of GBV musicians seems to have fully internalized the unmedicated riff-genius of Robert Pollard's song writing, and they meet this material on the field of battle in full blues-wailing flight.

As with 'Universal Truths & Cycles', the songs on 'Earthquake Glue' have the shine of instant classics. In Pollard's songwriting the cunning listener will hear strains and echoes of Ray Davies, John Entwistle, Syd Barrett, Roy Wood, and countless other craftsmen of the first psychedelic pop era. Pollard has consumed their work like oysters, and the stuff he spews as a result is a very special kind of sonic gas.

Listening to the gorgeous freakbeat dynamics of a song like "I'll Replace You With Machines" makes you imagine it's something Yo La Tengo will be doing as an acoustic set closer in 2012, or that Paul Thomas Anderson will slipping into a soundtrack later that year. I mean, this stuff is timeless, in the sense that its essence is stripped of all temporal contexts except those defined by electricity and rock & roll.

Then there's something like "A Trophy Mule in Particular" that churns like some impossible collaboration between the Idle Race and Sonic Youth, with lyrics by Dennis Wilson. Where the hell does something like that originate? It represents a mock syncretic fusion that is nothing if not the spume of incredulity.

Pollard and GBV are now about twenty years into their game. I can honestly say that I've been following it almost that whole time, and the sputtering-linear evolution and the profligate quality of the songcraft of which he is capable never fails to bugger my imagination.

'Earthquake Glue' is a fine bitch of an achievement. The songs are of the highest caliber, the band's playing has a holistic grasp of rock dynamism that swings like a horse's testicles, and the whole thing flows like a tureen full of the sweetest, softest butter imaginable.

As Pollard sings in "Secret Star" (a pseudo-prog Who epic), "[You] have to know your conjurer." Well, Pollard is a goddamn magician again on 'Earthquake Glue', and the spiral of insanely good GBV albums looks like it'll be continuing for a good long while.

Which is cool by me. You?

--Byron Coley, Deerfield MA 2003

The new Guided By Voices record, Universal Truths And Cycles, is being trumpeted by the band and assorted hangers-on as a “return to autonomy” but we have reason to believe that no one in the band can spell autonomy, even when drunk. There’s a few reasons it has been thus tagged: 1) because it’s self-produced, marking a return to old-school GbV ways (see Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, Under The Bushes, Under The Stars) and 2) like those earlier albums, there’s a fine mix of sandpapery snippets and semi-gloss punk/prog/pop. But the third and maybe the biggest reason large-syllabled words are being hurled like eggs with regard to the new album is who’s putting it out. Matador Records, New York City. Hi.

The thing about that, though, is we never realized Guided By Voices left the label. “Visionary leader/songwriter” Robert Pollard (as Gerard likes to call him, eyes upturned to heaven) releases so many damn side projects/solo albums/compilations/collaborations with people we thought were dead, that we long ago gave up trying to keep track. We figured the last two GbV albums — Do The Collapse and Isolation Drills, both fantastic records produced by pedigreed Rock People Ric Ocasek and Rob Schnapf, respectively — were side projects or experiments similar to Pollard’s own self-released Fading Captain series, and have been waiting patiently for him to deliver another album to us. His label. Matador Records, New York City.

Well, the wait is over, and the wait was worth the wait. Universal Truths And Cycles, described by Pollard “Alien Lanes meets Isolation Drills,” and by us as “the new Guided By Voices album,” may be the best thing the band has ever produced. Studio savvy when it needs to be — see big rock numbers like “Back To The Lake” and “Cheyenne” — and intimate, even tossed-off where appropriate — see “Father Sgt. Christmas Card” and “The Weeping Bogeyman” — Univeral Truths And Cycles arc-welds the lessons learned working in professional recording studios to the spontaneous approach of earlier, wild-haired Guided By Voices albums. The result: delicious pie! UTAC should please lo-fi nostalgia freaks and studio sheen addicts alike, and those few not yet convinced of Pollard’s songwriting genius will be left slack-jawed and drooling at the quantity and quality of musical ideas compressed into three-minute gems like “Everywhere With Helicopter,” “Eureka Signs,” and “Pretty Bombs,” featuring the string quartet Invert.

Pollard’s singing, whether double-tracked on an expensive German microphone or murmured into a Radio Shack cassette player, sounds more assured and more elastic than ever. Doug Gillard’s guitar playing has evolved to the point where you can’t imagine Guided By Voices without his soaring, incandescent leads and unexpected juxtapositions of texture and tone. And the rest of the band — well, they’re great, too. Word is GbV has acquired a new drummer, different from the one who plays on UTAC, but that, too, represents a kind of band tradition, and early reports from recent live shows have been uniformly happy.

What else? Pollard’s lyrics seem to get better and darker with age, and you can spin yourself silly trying to figure out whether the two jets streaking over the end of “Storm Vibrations,” a sound effect added long before the events of 9/11, are a weird psychic portent or just a continuation of Pollard’s longtime Dayton, OH (The Birthplace of Aviation, and the Hometown of Guided By Voices) aeronautical obsession. We could list the High Profile devotees (including leading lights of both cinema and music) and the string of Well Known bands inspired by Guided By Voices, but that would sound like an argument for relevance when the fact is UTAC makes its own argument, and far more eloquently than we could. We don’t know if GbV, or any band, are capable of saving rock, but we do that if rock is worth saving, it’s in no small part because of Guided By Voices.

INTENSE detailed discography at www.gbv.com

An entertaining, warts-and-all look at the Dayton, Ohio, rock legends, as filmed by documentarian Banks Tarver. Includes live performance footage, many interviews, celebrity cameos and a very angry doorman from Emo’s. At the end of the film, the viewer is treated to a short compilation of GBV promotional videos (we can’t mention the titles yet, but many of your favorites will be included).

On September 14, 1996 the following anonymous post appeared on the Internet: "No G-B-V! No G-B-V! It can’t be! Does anyone know why Guided by Voices is breaking up — I heard Bob wants to go back to teaching. Is this true?"

This desperate post started a landslide of speculation among Guided by Voices fans all over the world. And when the band released the Sunfish Holy Breakfast EP last November, the rumors got worse: Who are those naked guys on the cover? Why did Bob and Mitch and Toby grow those beards and take their clothes off — is this like GBV’s Let It Be album? Is that Cobra Verde?

THE ANSWER

Bob Pollard has not joined a nudist colony and he isn’t going back to teaching. He has just released the "most diverse, fucked up, rocking, kick-ass crazy-ass saddest, get wild, sophisticated pop sounding" (Bob’s words) Guided By Voices record to date, Mag Earwhig, a 21-song LP recorded in Cleveland with Cobra Verde and in Dayton with brother Jim Pollard and Tobin Sprout.

THE STORY

Since forming Guided By Voices in 1983, with the help of brother Jimmy and "manager for life" Pete Jamison (they both went in on a loan with Bob from the Dayton Public Schools Credit Union to finance their early records), Bob Pollard has recorded 10 GBV albums with 51 different lineups (see GBV family tree). Every time the vampire on Titus has needed some new blood to stay young, he’s stirred things up. So last fall, after writing some new songs--and after Toby, Mitch and Kevin went solo--Bob called on Cleveland neo-glamsters Cobra Verde (who also record for Scat Records, GBV’s previous label). Though Bob had first met the band in 1994, while GBV and CV were touring together on the Scat Records Insects of Rock Tour, he had been a longtime fan of their previous band, Death of Samantha. Other than mutual admiration, Bob and CV were also united in their addiction to Rock. After talking about doing it for two years, Bob picked up the phone and called CV singer-guitarist John Petkovic; by November he was in Cleveland recording the new GBV record with CVers Doug Gillard (lead guitar), Dave Swanson (drums), Don Depew (bass) and Petkovic (guitar). The band recorded at 609 Recording, a studio owned by Depew--who also engineered and mixed the record. Everyone took turns playing rock-guitar, twirling synth knobs and producing.

MAG EARWHIG

After recording 15 songs, Bob went back to Dayton, locked himself in the Monument Club, a customized garage in his backyard used for partying, and started sequencing and resequencing the record--36 different ways. But he couldn’t fight the urge to record more songs--first, with an actual producer, John Croslin (Spoon, Dumptruck), and then some spontaneous, basement-sounding stuff--both sessions with Jim Pollard and Tobin Sprout. Now the title. Back to the Monument Club to strategize (and party with his friends). After numerous suggestions (Honey Locust Honkytonk, Phantasmagoric Upstart, Do the Collapse, The Collossus Crawls West, Dear Multiples of Christ, A Cracking Coat Wear I Dig That, Black Ghost Pie), the concept was realized: Mag Earwhig, a 21-song epic rock fairy tale. Bob then returned to the Monument Club to resume partying with his buddies.

It’s been a long three years since Dayton, Ohio’s Guided By Voices were yanked out of obscurity by Scat Records. In that time the band signed a massive contract with Matador Records (strapping the label and forcing them to drop 37 bands), quit their day jobs (schoolteacher, sandpaper factory worker, psychological counselor; Tobin still paints), collected Britannica-sized volumes of press, were proffered big-time management, recorded with various big-name indie rock producers, got their songs covered by Earth’s worst bands (don’t ask who, it’ll bum you out), contracted gout, headlined tours overseas and in the Americas (the live in Rio bootleg, Millions Of Brazilians, is testament to their Queen-sized hugeness), participated in epic street battles, insulted Canadians, went through three bass players (quit/fired, became a lawyer, quit/fired), reached coveted backlash status, and got limited play on commercial radio stations.

In November 1995, chief Robert Pollard, loving husband of Kim and father of Brian (15) and Erica (12), handed in Guided By Voices’ darkest and most obscure record to date. The 60-odd songs the band had recorded in 24-track studios had all been scrapped. Pollard was adamant about releasing a home-taped album "as is, no compromises, man," citing his dissatisfaction with the hi-fi material.

Then he changed his mind and went into a 24-track studio along with Fennell and Sprout and banged out the majority of songs on Under The Bushes in two days. The results are Guided By Voices’ clearest and most ecstatic album to date. "It took a while to get comfortable recording outside of Tobe’s house. Recording and playing live were always two separate entities. We felt kind of uptight on some of the 24-track stuff we’d done before. We figured out a way to make the two meet, which is to keep the formula of not overrehearsing. But now we can go in and treat it like Tobe’s place."

Note how MVP Tobin Sprout, photo-realist painter, loving husband of Laura and brand-new father of Hunter, steps out of his Harrison/Entwistle role with four big songs ("To Remake The Young Flyer," "Atom Eyes," "It’s Like...," "The Perfect Life"), his biggest contribution to a GBV album so far.

At the end, about 35 songs from the earlier version of Under The Bushes were cut; some were kept after much begging and pleading by their friends.

Rock writers might want to bear in mind that GBV are talked about more than heard. Their Cinderella story is a good one but it is not a good reason to listen to them; all the inevitable and annoying hype happens because their songs trigger synapses. Enjoy the rock -- if a song is good, nobody can own it.

Guided By Voices is:

Robert Pollard (vocal)
Tobin Sprout (guitar)
Mitch Mitchell (guitar)
Kevin Fennell (drums)

The lead-off single from the upcoming 11th album by Dayton’s Guided By Voices (Under the Bushes Under the Stars). Since 1995’s Alien Lanes Guided By Voices have been touring America and Europe, quitting their day jobs, drinking beer and writing songs... more and more songs.

Both formats include the title track and 3 bonus non-LP songs: "Deaf Ears," "Why Did You Land?" and "June Salutes You!"

Produced by Kim Deal, who sings backup on "June Salutes You"; guitar lead by Trip Lampkin of the Grifters.

The A-side of this single is "Motor Away," from Guided By Voices’ eleventh album, Alien Lanes, in a new unusual hi-fi 24-track version (not on the LP). The B-side, "The Color of My Blade," is a non-LP song in ultra lo-fi cassette-deck sound.

This record, the eighth full-length LP from America’s finest exponents of rock’n’roll songwriting and from-the-heartland warmth, contains 28 songs. We like to call it GBV’s White Album . Genuine and insincere fans alike will recognize classics like "Watch Me Jumpstart," "My Valuable Hunting Knife" and "Motor Away." This extended excavation of American childhood, memory and the niceties of human contact tosses away the jaggeder edges of Bee Thousand for an occasional documentary of the more distorted margins of pop/rock history: the last songs on side 2 of early Kinks albums, the song-structures of mid-period Wire and one-offs by Deram bands from Colchester and Canterbury. In their transfer from lo-fi to lo-mid-fi, Guided By Voices have scraped off only a little piece of the browning acetate that covers their conceptual picture sleeve.

BRIEF HISTORY

Rock band from Northridge, Ohio.
Genesis post Anacrusis circa 1983 C.R.E.
(Common Rock Era)
Captain Bizarre pushes his amp down Needmore in the snow: 1984
First publicly available recorded output:1986
First Scat LP, Vampire On Titus, 1992
Greg Demos buys his first pair of striped pants: 1993
First Matador LP:Alien Lanes, 1995

RELEVANT INFORMATION

Recorded on 4 & 8-track devices in various basement and living room locations throughout the Dayton, Ohio, metroplex.

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING

"You wouldn’t like it either if it wasn’t worth a shit."
- Carol Pollard
"Terrible lyrics." - D. Wolk, College Medical Journal (CMJ)
"For a musician, you’re an asshole." - M. Montgomery
"You guys are great! Can I join your band if I write lots of flattering stuff about you?"
- J. Greer, Spin

For more information on the infinite fractions of GBV, including a rousing account of R. Pollard’s athletic triumphs (as well as those of his brother, J. Pollard), please see the Guiness Book of Guided By Voices Records, edited by M. Sweeney and M. Ibold.

THE LINEUP

Robert Pollard
Tobin Sprout
Mitch Mitchell
Kevin Fennell
Jim Greer