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crossorigin="anonymous"></script>To be honest, I wasn’t even surprised when I learned from the Facebook feed of rock journal The Fire Note that Guided by Voices had put out another new album — It’s Not Them. It Couldn’t Be Them. It is Them! — hence marking their fourth of the young decade so far and fifth Bob Pollard effort if you count his excellent side project Cub Scout Bowling Pins. It’s gotten to the point with this band, who I think always made their mark by emphasizing process over results, in the sense of knowing what they do, doing it and giving a fu** if you like it or not, where I just expect this dizzying output that’s got no business being as hypnotic, meaningful and funny as it’s been lately.
With this last release, I sat down pretty much expecting to like it, as I have with just about everything Pollard’s touched since Do the Collapse, but then on listening to the first track my face showed more confusion and compunction than triumph. It’s very minimalist, see: it’s got the feel of a side project, with auxiliary singer/songwriter Tobin Sprout (catalyst behind “Mincer Ray,” et. al.) having exited the band back in 1997. The first track on this new album “Spanish Coin” was almost like a toy being dangled in front of my face, with part of me knowing I could never catch it and then the other part, just enough, luring me in with the thought that maybe some sort of righteous prize would be mine.
“High in the Rain,” the first of many songs on this album to make an impression by just the title alone, was what first “sucked me in,” so to speak, and really, on the whole, was unlike anything else I’d ever heard, either in GBV’s catalogue or in lo-fi rock, as a whole. If anything, it reminded me vaguely of the R.E.M. song “The Wrong Child,” where the protagonist, the singer, is relating a frank and vivid first-person story about a kind of hopeless state where the narrative focuses more on real-life details than dramatic extrapolations or theoretical platitudes. In “High in the Rain,” Pollard remarks “It started at the playground / It followed me to my senses / It was a superficial contact / A victory of the ego”. This set of lyrics was very interesting to me because, basically, Pollard is conceding the fact that this experience of being stoned and walking around on a playground wasn’t as valuable as time spent with another person or forging a friendship or relationship, yet these expeditions of solitude are nonetheless sometimes important and paramount in life, for self-searching and galvinizing your identity, and they can lead to even more meaningful relationships down the road, should you successfully live thorugh them and then learn to transmit them to others. And the song is rendered so authentically and such bright detail that you really sink into it, hence making it hard for me to make fun of this band. I’d had a post tentatively planned that was going to be like “Ok, Guided by Voices, You’re the Best Band Ever! God!” But truthfully, I’ve gotta admit, this is disarming stuff, and what I’m trying to allude to in the title is that, particularly in the case of “High in the Rain” but also applicable to the rest of this LP, this is music that conveys a clear, stark vision, one that almost becomes cinematic for the listener. In this way, moments of listening are nurtured and strengthened, to where the hypnotic effect causes time to go by faster, when you’re listening. And that, my friends, was the point of this post.