Essential Guided By Voices Albums

Guided by Voices’ first full-length album is the sound of a band finding itself. Early R.E.M. emerges as a strong influence, from the already elliptical lyrics and occasionally murky vocals to Mitch Mitchell’s Mike Mills-like bass sound on “Old Battery” and the tumbling rhythms and splashy chords of “Discussing Wallace Chambers.” But the foreboding “A Portrait Destroyed by Fire” could be a Blue Oyster Cult demo. Meanwhile, “Hank’s Little Fingers” is an early flex of GBV’s offbeat power-pop gift, and multiple oddball instrumentals keep you guessing all along the way.

In another universe, GBV ended on it’s fifth album. The whole story could have ended right here. GBV had toiled in obscurity for over five years and a weary Pollard initially planned Propeller as a swan song. Thankfully, he reconsidered, but if he hadn’t, they’d have gone out grandly.

The comparatively epic-length “Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox” feels like a cousin of The Who’s pre-Tommy rock opera, “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” replete with multiple movements, tempo shifts, and art-rock embellishments. “Weedking” comes off like a love letter to Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. And the dizzying “Back to Saturn X Radio Report” pastes together pieces of tunes that the band would later complete, fashioning a disjointed suite.

When the onslaught of new fans galvanized by Bee Thousand started working their way back through the band’s discography, their first discovery was likely an album even more unabashedly lo-fi.

With Vampire on Titus, GBV sometimes comes across like Badfinger as heard through the far end of a sewer pipe (“Wished I Was a Giant”) and sometimes like The Replacements winning a battle of the bands where the prize is a lifetime supply of Budweiser (“Dusted”). The customary quota of under-a-minute tracks are as impeccably out there as anything that would follow. Ultimately, it’s easy to connect the dots between this and the band’s big breakthrough.

After more than a decade’s worth of work, Guided by Voices broke through to the wider world with their seventh album, initially released on Cleveland’s tiny Scat label.

Bee Thousand made GBV ‘90s indie icons and leaders of the lo-fi movement. By this time, they were the aural equivalent of Jackson Pollock-style action painters, prioritizing inspiration and spontaneity. These glorious four-track home recordings capture the group’s chaotic instrumentals and sterling vocal hooks that feature outlandish imagery.

In short, who’d have expected a tune called “Kicker of Elves” to be so hummable?

After becoming hipster heroes, the band signed with Matador, arguably America’s hottest indie label at the time. Instead of tidying up with big (i.e. any) budget production, GBV doubled down on their DIY ethos.

Alien Lanes hosts as much sonic grime as its predecessor. Is the beat on “My Hunting Knife” a flyswatter striking a vinyl seat cover or a drum kit recorded through a next-door window? We’ll never know. The dadaist miniatures get even smaller—in just 22 seconds “Hit” gleefully skewers any expectations of GBV playing the music-biz game, with Pollard emphatically repeating “That’s a hit!” over a careening musical implosion. 

Under the Bushes, Under the Stars proves that you can take the boys out of the basement but the reverse is impossibie. It was recorded in a real-deal studio (more than one, actually) with multiple producers, including indie-rock godhead Steve Albini and Pixies/Breeders bad-ass Kim Deal. So, the cowbell on “Rhine Jive Click” sounds like a cowbell, not a beer can.

A lifelong prog fan, Pollard originally envisioned a rock opera, reconsidering because, as he cheekily told The Onion, “I didn’t want to have to go on a press tour to explain what it meant.” Instead, Under the Bushes offers better-recorded variations on the kind of catchy-yet-baffling fragments of brilliance fans had come to adore.

Mag Earwhig! marked the band’s biggest shift up to that point. Pollard parted with all his stalwart crew, including longtime guitarist/co-writer Tobin Sprout. In their place are Cleveland cohorts Cobra Verde, former Scat labelmates and purveyors of raw, aggressive indie music with excessive crunch. Unsursprisingly, GBV sound like they’re on more of a mission to rock than before. 

“Bulldog Skin” is as fine a piece of Cheap Trick-worthy power pop as the catalog contains. And Pollard gets his ‘70s beard-rock ya-ya’s out on “Portable Men’s Society” as the band goes full Uriah Heep, complete with extended guitar wailing. For fans searching for something extra rough around the edges, look no further.

Hopping from Matador to TVT Records, GBV made their first major move toward a straighter sound by drafting Ric Ocasek to produce Do the Collapse. The bigger, punchier guitar assault was the sound of Pollard pursuing the perfect rock dream.

The frontman told The Onion, “[Ocasek’s] intention was to make a big, polished rock record, a guitar-predominant record, and he did that. That’s what I wanted…. I liked the guitar sound on the [Ocasek-produced debut] Weezer record—that big, crunchy, in-your-face guitar sound.”

All the streamlined rockers notwithstanding, the gentle “Hold on Hope” is one of the band’s most touching, emotionally naked tunes.

By the turn of the 21st century, GBV seemed happy to finally  meet the mainstream halfway. Isolation Drills was their second tidied-up, famous-producer-assisted album in a row.

Rob Schnapf had produced breakout records for Beck and Elliott Smith, and it sounds like he was out to help GBV snare as much of the Fountains of Wayne fanbase as possible. The summery power-pop anthem “Glad Girls” could have easily come bouncing out of a Big Star album.

The album’s still miles from actual slickness and contains the requisite loopy left turns, but overall, it was the most instantly accessible thing the band had yet created. 

Pollard had threatened to fold up his tent and go home more than once during GBV’s career, but eventually it took. He told Harp that Half Smiles of the Decomposed “had a tone of finality, some kind of melancholy feel. I realized this was it, and it was difficult, but I said, ‘This is the last album, guys.’”

True to his word, Pollard went solo after Half Smiles’ release, and there wasn’t another GBV album until 2012. The band’s farewell to the 2000s alternates between reflective (“Sing for Your Meat”) and elegiac (“Girls of Wild Strawberries”), a fitting goodbye, at the time, for the now elder statesmen of scuzz.