Guided by Voices — Thick Rich and Delicious (GBV Inc.)
Guided by Voices doesn’t spend a lot of time looking in the rear view mirror. Sure, the band will break out an old favorite in the live setting, but for the records, they move on relentlessly, song after song after song after song. And so it’s a bit of a surprise, late in the excellent Thick Rich and Delicious, to recognize a scrap of “Ester’s Day” wrapped into “The Lighthouse Resurrection.”
The song, as you may recall, originally appeared towards the end of the landmark Bee Thousand, still arguably the best of GBV’s 30-odd full lengths. There the brief, mysterious cut shuddered with reverbed keyboards and cryptic lyrics (“Jimmy was a fly, got sucked in by an actor/And wrapped in a cocoon and skin-tight buffoonery/Now, here's the plan...) but ended in a lovely melody. It flickered gracefully between sci-fi oddity and fuzzy pop as GBV songs are wont to do. Now, 30 years later, its framed in more boisterous terms, a wall of rock guitars banging on behind the no longer fragile melody, the pop ending elided in favor of sheer force and volume. It is, as the title suggests, Thick Rich and Delicious.
This is the second GBV album of 2025, after last spring’s Strut of Kings. It’s a welcome sign of life after rumors of the band’s demise surfaced a few years ago (they’re not breaking up, but if you still haven’t seen them live, you’re likely too late). It continues a string of very strong, late career albums from an unusually stable, worn-in line-up. Guided by Voices has always been a band centered around Robert Pollard, but he’s been supported by Doug Gillard, Kevin March, Mark Shue and Bobby Bare Jr. for almost a decade now. The songs are good, full of fetching turns of melody and surrealist images, but they sound especially excellent bashed out with clanging chords and pounding rhythms and intuitive rock-and-roll energy.
I like the ratcheting tension of “Lucy’s World,” where guitars rave up in ascending frenzies and drums batter wrecklessly in tow. And then, as often happens, the smoke clears, and the verse slinks in, dodging guitar offbeats and pummeling bass. Pollard’s ode to non-conformity emerges. “Lucy’s world is not designed, to get you to the church on time,” he sings, eschewing the mundane for psychedelic vistas, and later, “Watch out for optical illusions.” It’s meat and potatoes rock about otherworldly scenarios, accessible and strange.
“A Tribute to Beatle Bob” memorializes the mop-topped eccentric who was nearly ubiquitous at Austin shows until his death in 2023, but it also traces Pollard’s own long love affair with rock music, name-checking Rodney Bingenheimer, the Dave Clarke Five, the Terry Jacks chestnut “Seasons in the Sun” and the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird.” Someday, maybe not too far in the future, we may be listening to a tribute to Robert Pollard, and let’s hope he gets as good as he gives.
But meanwhile, he’s living mostly in the present, cranking out visceral, gut-grabbingly hooky rock anthems without much regard for legacy or history. “(You Can’t Go Back to) Oxford Talawanda,” is one of the best, with its careening windmill chords, its thundering drum fills, its exuberant, instantly memorable chorus, and it’s all in service of a song about never going back. Ever onward, that’s the way to do it.
In an interview following the announcement of the new Guided By Voices record, Strut of Kings, Robert Pollard explained why it would, uncharacteristically, be the group’s only release this year: “I just wanted to give this one a little more time to sink in with the fans. Give them some breathing space.” Take Pollard at his word: Strut of Kings is worth the focus and, speaking of space, it’ll take up as much as your speakers allow.
Back in 2018, I wrote that Space Gun (also that year’s only GBV album) was “a protein-rich re-entry point from which to backtrack through the post-millennium catalog…with triumphant blends of sweeping rhythm guitar, ascending lead riffs and rolling rhythm sections.” Six years and 13 albums later, I’ll say the same of Strut of Kings, only more so. As on Space Gun, Pollard is backed by Bobby Bare Jr., Doug Gillard, Mark Shue, and Kevin March, but here they play with a stormier ambition that adds an extra potency to the songs. This isn’t angry music, exactly, but it is noticeably heavier and sounds off with a harder-rocking urgency.
On the edgier end of things come ornery, ear-ringing slugfests like “Olympus Cock In Radiana” and “Cavemen Running Naked.” The first of which heaves around thick, fuzzy guitar arpeggios over a dogged stomp with the bare menace of early Black Sabbath. The second evokes both Queens of the Stone Age with its brute force drumming and taut, meaty riffs and Thin Lizzy with its buzzy, glamorous bursts of guitar. Sequenced between those two and yet darker is “Leaving Umbrella.” The track, slow, sheer and draped with cymbal crashes and sliding walls of distortion, finds Pollard wallowing in a psychedelic, fantastical fog, like a long lost David Bowie album for Southern Lord.
Ill-tempered bangers aside, Strut of Kings is, like so much of Pollard’s vast catalog, at its best in rich, punchy, power pop mode. One of Pollard’s great strengths as a vocalist is delivering even his hardest-to-parse lines with the conviction of confessional poetry. As the sparkling strum and thrust of “Fictional Environment Dream” is lifted by sustained electronic keys, “trying to sell me/on such same primitive tools/programming fever dreams/with the fools/let them expel me” might as well be Matthew Sweet lamenting “I’m sick of myself when I look at you.” It’s one of several moments when the musical ambition and vigor of this album crosses into more radiant, but no less powerful territory. Take, for instance, the long, elegiac build of “Bit Of A Crunch,” from clean, picked guitar to a robust, sunbreak-after-rain stadium balladry close to Oasis’ ragged, golden “Don’t Go Away.” Perhaps the record’s most potent blend of beauty and brawn, however, is “Serene King.” At the bridge, while Pollard raps towards his jet plane takeoff on the final refrain, a rapid series of single guitar notes shoot up from the bullying rumble of bass, drums and blasting, third-rail rhythm chords, taking the song from fist-pumping to something like transcendent.
Chalk it up to the explosive instrumentals, but the lyrics, often the most beguiling aspect of a Guided By Voices record, aren’t the most memorable part of Strut of Kings. One verse, though, from the album closer “Bicycle Garden,” stands out: “Though all the roses are dying/the old nest climbing with ivy/is lively.” What better way to describe Pollard’s indefatigable musical career than in terms of voracious regeneration. With this latest liveliness, Pollard and company continue that relentless growth. And remember, they’re leaving the breathing space for you: no one said they needed it.
Universe Room is Guided by Voices’ 41st album. The prolific singer/songwriter Robert Pollard populates the record with a number of characteristically aphoristic songs, making its longest, “19th Man to Fly an Airplane,” which clocks in at 3:44, seem positively extended in form in comparison to the rest.
Pollard has maintained the current lineup of the band — guitarists Doug Gillard and Bobby Bare, Jr., bassist Mark Shue, and drummer Kevin March — for nearly a decade, and the group has assimilated the Guided by Voices sound nearly down to the cellular level. “I Will Be a Monk” is a case in point. Enigmatic lyrics about a man who takes vows to avoid heartbreak are accompanied by a loping groove in the first verse followed by a straight rock chorus that persists through the rest of the song. Snatches of soloing accompany the vocals, and the initial vibe is reinstated as a crunching riff. All this in 1:31.
There aren’t as many anthemic choruses in Universe Room as on some Guided by Voices recordings.Sometimes, as on “Dawn Believes,” they sneak up on you. The spare arrangement of two verses gives way to a belated rousing second half. “Independent Animal” is another energetic miniature with a showcase for the guitars as an outro. Pollard’s voice betrays a bit of wear and tear, which is understandable given the amount of tequila he consumes in a single live set. The enhanced reverb supplied to the vocals betrays a bit of self-consciousness about diminishing returns. He still knows how to deliver a song convincingly. The aforementioned “19th Man to Fly an Airplane” is a keeper, with an arpeggiated solo at its outset and crunching downstrokes accompanying a narrative verse with a driven chorus, a maelstrom surrounding Pollard. The tempo shifts downward, and another vocal hook appears, just as memorable as the first. A coda of percussion imitates an early airplane.
After so many albums, it was inevitable that Guided by Voices would provide perhaps the ultimate swerve, “Fran Cisco.” a flamenco song. It is great fun, and one of the most elaborate arrangements on the recording. It is good to hear that wry humor is still a part of Pollard’s orbit.
Universe Room may not be the best of recent recordings by the band, but it is certainly a wide reaching addition to their catalog.
Guided by Voices songs have never been as simple and accessible as they sound, but there’s no question that lately Robert Pollard has been taking them in more oblique directions. Brash, fuzzy guitar riffs collide with twining, folk-derived modal melodies, sure, just like always, but the song structures are more complicated and open-ended than you remember from Isolation Drills. There are multiple parts, there are eerie wordless vocals, there are stark, stabbing piano intervals that set up lush rock band anthems. The words follow twisting, self-referential paths, moving quickly from one surreal image to the next, and checking back on previous phrases with sudden internal rhymes. These are songs like Gaudi architecture, friendly and childlike at a glance, ungodly complicated underneath.
La La Land, GBV’s first (but probably not last) album of 2023, continues the proggish explorations you might have noticed in last year’s Tremblers and Goggles by Rank (from my review: “The first thing you notice about Tremblers and Goggles by Rank is that these are not the short, melodically charged, fuzzball bon bons you may have come to expect from Guided by Voices.”)
Then as now, a seasoned band makes these twists and turns possible, even enjoyable. The ensemble, which includes Doug Gillard, Bobby Bare Jr., Mark Shue and Kevin March is now on its 14th Guided by Voices record. They nail the curves and changeups so well that you only notice the complexity in retrospect. While it’s happening, it seems mostly like good rock music.
The words touch lightly on all manner of topics in a sunny sci-fi way. Mortality is, possibly, the subject of “Face Eraser” but so is creative evolution and the uneasy way it is received in lines like “Now that you’ve found just what you’re made of/you should stay down.” “Pockets” is about just what the title suggests, but also about all the things we hold and treasure—and a few that we maybe don’t. But Pollard’s lyrics are like puzzle pieces, holding elliptical bits of meaning that might change completely if they were arranged in another way.
Pollard’s genius is that he can make you sing along in the shower to words that you probably don’t understand. Who is the crypto woman? Who is the thermometer child? What exactly is Pollard saying about the last three years in a line from “Wild Kingdom” when he observes, “Not to vaccinate/but to baptize a new creation/the next mutation of you.” Never mind, it’s hitched to a graceful, curving line of melody and it resonates the way a Miro painting does, even if it doesn’t relate, exactly, to the world you see.
While you’re reading this review, Robert Pollard will make two more albums. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but the lo-fi prophet of Central Ohio is certainly insanely productive. This particular disc is his 29th overall under the Guided by Voices name and, remarkably, the third this year. Even more remarkably, it is damned good, a concise exercise in muscular rock and roll whimsy that, while not quite knocking Bee Thousand off its perch, is perfectly in line with the steady stream of quality guitar rock that Pollard has been churning out for decades.
This iteration of GBV brings the heavy guitar artillery, marshalling not just Pollard himself but long-time associate Doug Gillard and newer addition Bobby Bare, Jr. There’s a hard edge in these manic strummers, a metallic clank and thunk behind its shapely, graceful, wistful melodies. These instruments remain mostly basic and disciplined, thwacking out the contours of the songs, yet occasionally, they slip the leash. “Street Party,” breaks the rain of eighth-note strumming with an exhilarating run of viscous, bendy, Frampton-esque 1970s guitar bravado; it’s a busman’s holiday for closet Comes Alive fans.
The influences are, as always, a passel of 1960s British guitar icons—the Kinks at the soft, fey, tricksy end, the Who at the full-blast part of the spectrum. (There is just a trace of British-ism in Pollard’s vocal delivery, which is a bit jarring but also somehow endearing.) Yet the melody of “Heavy Like the World,” has a gentle, curving sweetness that hints at American jangle rockers, from the Byrds through Tom Petty. All of which is to say that no one is boldly going where no one has gone; the objective is to make new tunes sound like classics, like songs you’ve been hearing all your life on radio, like something you remember with fondness, even the first time they spin.
And for the most part it works. “Tiger on Top,” starts in whispery vulnerability, bringing and ache that feels like nostalgia, and even when it erupts in windmilling power chords, there’s a time past and passing melancholy there, a tenderness, a grace. You wonder how Pollard feels about the endless parade of musical styles, trendy bands, number-ones-with-a-bullet that have flowed around him for the last several decades, as his own music has remained rooted in a particular era. You wonder about all the albums, all the line-ups, all the side men that have come and gone, too, as Pollard seeks the balance of power chord and wistful whimsy, one song at a time.
