Guided By Voices - The Best of Guided By Voices: Human Amusements at Hourly Rates
(Matador)
For me, the sign of a great pop tune is a killer hook with a catchy verse that sticks in your head for days. Now if you take every song that fits that category, what you essentially get is basically the same melody repeated over and over for three minutes: verse-chorus-bridge-verse. Well, imagine how great it would be if you could just release the killer hook and throw away the peripheral baggage, that excess filler usually referred to as the "bridge" and "verse"! Well, therein lies the philosophy of Robert Pollard and his Guided By Voices project. Unfortunately, the flipside of that argument is that a GBV song can be likened to the aural equivalent of a premature ejaculation: just when the going gets good, it's all over before you reach the "money shot." When I saw 32 tracks (from 16 different albums, singles and EPs) shoehorned onto a single, 77-minute CD, I suspected the worse: a compilation of their finest "auditory hallucinations" masquerading as songs - a bunch of sound samples advertising some expensive box set (which, in fact, it is - a slightly different lineup of songs graces disk one of the Hardcore UFOs 5xCD box). Then when I noticed that head Voice, Bob Pollard assembled this "best of," I knew I was in for a bumpy ride, for we all know how disastrous band-assembled greatest hits collections are.
So I want to say that not only was I pleasantly surprised, no shocked, by the quality of the choices here, but let me go on record as the first to suggest that this may be the best "best of" of the year! Oh, the Brion Gysin-esque cut-up surreal titles are still often better than the songs themselves ("Tractor Rape Chain," 14 Cheerleader Coldfront," "Echos Myron," "Exit Flagger," etc.) and there's the usual blink-and-you-missed-'em noises (the 80-second opener, "A Salty Salute" and "Shocker In Gloomtown," the 90-second "14 Cheerleader Coldfront" (which Paul Weller should've been all over like white on rice), "Non-Absorbing," "Teenage FBI," and the Wild Man Fisher-meets-Kim Fowley rap of the funky "Hot Freaks", the 23-second "Hit"), but these are overshadowed by numerous examples of what the band can accomplish when they actually finish a song: from the recent "The Best of Jill Hives" (despite its unsettling double-tracked vocals), to the jangly, wall-of-pop classics, "Things I Will Keep," "Twilight Campfighter," and "Glad Girls;" from the Hollies-on speed of "Everywhere With Helicopter," the big, fat 70s power chords of the epic, 41/2 minute(!) "I Am A Tree," The Beatles-esque (yet poor demo quality of) "14 Cheerleader Coldfront," to the equally Weller-esque bedsitter images of "Drinker's Peace" and the sugary pop confection of "Surgical Focus;" from the garage rock of The Replacements-like "Bulldog Skin" and "Back To The Lake" (a band GBV is most often compared with - in fact, I'd describe them to the uninitiated as Kinks-meets-Replacements), to the rudimentary scrapings of "Shocker In Gloomtown" and the raw, Byrds-on punk "Captain's Dead;" there's even time for the sonic experiments of that electronic echo chamber that permeates "Learning To Hunt."
Through it all, the melody is king and while the disk has enough melodies and ideas for 50 songs, the fact that there are only 32 is both the blessing and curse of GBV. Still, to wade through their enormous back catalogue (I think Pollard claims to have written over 2,000 songs and sometimes it seems he's determined to release every one of them, whether they're finished or not) is a daunting task, so we thank Pollard for saving us the trouble. While just as many great songs were undoubtedly omitted, this is still the best intro to the band and is required listening for everyone who's HEARD OF the band, without actually having HEARD them.
The only downside is Pollard's refusal to acknowledge the significant contributions of Tobin Sprout (he only gets one song, "To Remake the Young Flyer," with its guitar riff stolen from the Acid Casualties' "Floating"), so, rocknroll egos being what they are, Pollard's "this is my band" attitude ultimately distorts what could have been the definitive GBV compilation. Since Sprout was always the better, poppier, more polished songwriter (just listen to their respective solo albums), his omission is inexcusable, leaving us with this "Pollard-colored-glasses" view of one of America's finest, albeit frustrating bands. It traces the kings of lo-fi pop - that horrendous microgenre that was popular for about 15 minutes in the late 80s until people came to their senses and realized that it was really just rank amateurism trying to pass for music - from the humble beginnings of 1987's Devil Between My Toes right on up to this summer's Earthquake Glue. And although there are mercilessly few stops at last year's godawful Universal Truths and Cycles, there are also too few drinks at the fountains of Under The Bushes, Under The Stars, Do The Collapse or Mag Earwhig! Somewhere along the trip, I'm sure you'll find something you'll like.
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