Click here for YouTube and Spotify links to the final version of my GBV 100 playlist:
With the release of last week’s excellent Strut of Kings, Ohio’s favorite sons Guided by Voices have now released a jaw-dropping 17 albums of new material in the past 7 years, all with the same lineup. It’s an absolutely staggering output over such a short timeframe, even when one considers Robert Pollard’s well-documented prolificacy, especially for a band 40 years into its career. It’s also been extremely difficult to keep up with, even for the most dedicated fan.
Back in the ‘90s, I was one of those very fans - a Matter Eater Lad for all things Guided by Voices. Having first heard the group via my college roommate Peter in the summer of 1994, I got absolutely hooked on Bee Thousand shortly after its release. Six months later, the incredible Alien Lanes deepened my obsession, and by late 1996 I was a full-blown junkie for the band’s infectious array of short, tight curios, and seemingly endless, undeniable melodies. I devoured absolutely everything GBV put out, past and present, and listened to them constantly, while also attending as many shows as I possibly could with my erstwhile gang of fellow fanatics. GBV shows were my church in that era, with a camaraderie all its own; there’s simply nothing like singing every word of every song with a few hundred of your new favorite strangers. I saw them almost a dozen times until their first breakup in 2004, including the “final” show - the “Electrifying Conclusion” at Chicago’s Metro on 12/31/2004. That cold December night, we all said goodbye together, shed a few tears, and saw Robert Pollard go Off To (solo) Business.
When the news broke of the classic lineup reuniting in 2010, I beamed with pride. It was a dream come true to see the old stalwarts back, and a pure joy to witness a bigger spotlight on the Classic Lineup of Pollard-Sprout-Mitchell-Demos-Fennell, who were utterly deserving of a curtain call in front of some way bigger crowds. I didn’t really connect strongly with the first reunion album Let’s Go Eat The Factory, and I struggled to keep up with the next 5(!) albums, as they were released in quick succession over the next 2 years. I wanted to get into the material, but soon became like a student procrastinating a term paper, one that kept getting dozens of pages added to it. “Luckily” for me, the group abruptly broke up again in 2014, and I got a bittersweet reprieve from the deluge.
Guided By Voices
Two years passed in a blink of an eye, and before I knew it, the band surprisingly reformed again in 2016. I caught the new lineup live that fall. They were back! They were great! There’s Doug Gillard! Yes! As I hugged a group of fellow Postal Blowfish and sang along to “Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” for the 20th time, I suddenly remembered my earlier vow. I STILL hadn’t completed my homework…. and another album was added to the pile. If 7 albums seemed like a lot to catch up on…I was definitely not prepared for what was to come.
Over the next seven years, I watched as this version of the band (now rechristened the “New Classic Lineup”) became a finely tuned, well-oiled Guided by Voices machine, pumping out so many new albums that my head spun every three months. I always listened to each release at least a couple of times…but for me, GBV albums always need 20-30 overall listens - and several intentional ones - for them to really sink in, and I just didn’t have time to digest one before the next one was out. I felt like I was drowning in a sea of material with no life preserver in sight!
Along the way, of course, I also continued to read favorable reviews of each new album, rife with one-liners such as “absolutely unprecedented winning streak [GBV] have been on … (Pat King, Paste Magazine, 11/22/23)” and “latest in the impressive run…” (Simon Workman, The Fire Note, 11/24/23). It was always fantastic to see such press, but to me the material remained evasive. My stack of self-inflicted homework grew to an impossible mountain of 20+ albums, reaching a George RR Martin level of overdue. I had to do something! I wanted to finally KNOW all of this material that I was hearing so much about….this bounty of great GBV. Finally, 6 weeks ago, with a holiday weekend and no plans…I took drastic action.
I christened it “Guided by Voices Memorial Day Weekend”, shut my phone off, struck a rock pose, saluted the “Fading Captain,” made a “Freedom Cake” (quick to bake!), and began to comb through each album released in the past seven years methodically. I decided to skip the 1st Reunion and Please Be Honest for now (the latter felt more like a Pollard solo effort, with him playing all of the instruments himself), and I entirely focused just on the output of this lineup. I was determined to get into it! As I listened to all 17 albums, I dropped every track that caught my ear into a playlist, until I got to exactly 100 songs - the GBV 100. It sounded like the formula one race of my dreams, or my own personal ret-conned Suitcase. Along the way, I made sure there were at least 3 or 4 tracks from each release (up to 7 or 8 from some of my emerging favorites).
After I assembled the playlist, I listened on repeat for two weeks straight. I ripped a page from the Pollard collage album-making process, tweaking the order and content of the playlist as I listened. I pruned as I continued to discover crucial tracks I’d originally missed, by alternating between the playlist and the parent albums. Eventually, of course, I went back to just the albums, seeking to know each of their specific moods as intimately as I know Sandbox, Same Place the Fly Got Smashed, and Vampire on Titus. As the mood of each album emerged, I began to formulate reviews for all of them, and I couldn’t help but write them down and even rank them, in true music nerd fashion. When brand new album Strut of Kings dropped on June 28th, I listened closely to that one in the same way, and swapped in my favorite tracks into the playlist, reviewing it and ranking it alongside the others. Suffice it to say, it was far easier with just one album!
GBV circa 1995
This entire journey has been an unexpectedly joyous labor of love for a band that I obviously just can’t seem to get enough of at times in my life…especially in 1994 or in 2024. Throughout this process, I’ve gained a renewed appreciation for how singularly talented, unique, and exceptional Robert Pollard truly is, and how amazingly capable and versatile his backing band of Doug Gillard, Bobby Bare Jr., Kevin March, and Mark Shue is, as well. Those four men truly serve the songs and have had a huge hand in helping to facilitate this unparalleled windfall, and without them, I’m convinced we wouldn’t have even close to this much material. We are unbelievably lucky to enjoy this bounty at this late stage of the band’s career; may it continue for 7 more years and 17 more albums.
Included below are my rankings and reviews for every album of the New Classic Lineup, as well as a link to the final version of the playlist I assembled on both YouTube and Spotify. There’s also an extended review for Strut of Kings.
17. Crystal Nuns Cathedral (2022)
Apart from the exceptional “Re-develop,” “Excited Ones,” and “Crystal Nuns Cathedral,” I really struggle to connect with the rest of this slower, more moody effort. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like it; it’s just my least favorite one, and this version of GBV is a world of many flavors. For my taste, it feels a bit clean in its presentation (in similar ways to 1999’s Do the Collapse), and while some songs a little too deliberate in pacing (“Eye City,” “Forced to Sea”) others feature treatment or arrangement that feels forced (“Climbing a Ramp,” “Birds in the Pipe”). “Come North Together” and “Never Mind the List” are terrific numbers that just barely missed my playlist.
16. La La Land (2023)
The brilliant first half of this album features key winners “Instinct Dwelling,” (a thunderous, pulsating blatant doom trip with a great chorus) “Ballroom Ettiquette,” (a mid-tempo mid-fi slice of ease cut from the same fabric as 2002’s Universal Truths and Cycles), and “Queen of Spaces” (one of the most beautiful, haunting, spare ballads Pollard has ever produced). However, the second half drags a bit, starting with the bouncy “Slowly on the Wheel,” through to rocker “Face Eraser,” a stretch of songs that unfortunately magnifies the dry production too much for me. The LP does resolve triumphantly in a satisfying climax with the ebullient, irresistible “Pockets.” La La Land contains several good songs, but as an entire album, I don’t come back to it often.
15. Zeppelin Over China (2019)
Zeppelin Over China’s biggest strength is that it features the best hi-fidelity production of the era - without making GBV sound too cleaned up or sterile. Unfortunately, its biggest drawback is its extreme length, because at 74+ minutes and 32 songs, the album just contains way too much filler. The hits are definitely there in spades: “The Rally Boys,” “Carapace,” “Charmless Peters,” “Your Lights Are Out,” and “My Future in Barcelona” rank with some of Pollard’s very best recent songs, and they really shine with such clear, bright production. That being said, I often wonder if ZOC would have been better served if pared down to just a single album release, because as a double, many of the lesser album tracks just get lost in the shuffle for me.
14. August By Cake (2017)
On “August by Cake,” the first double album of GBV’s career and (by his count) Pollard’s 100th total release, many of the standout tracks are actually not the Pollard tracks themselves, but the surprisingly great material he allowed the other four members of the band to contribute under the Guided by Voices banner. “Sentimental Wars” is a superb, plaintive ballad featuring an excellent lead vocal by drummer Kevin March, while Doug Gillard’s “Goodbye Note” is a fantastic slice of straight forward, driving power pop. Both of Mark Shue and Bobby Bare Jr.’s offerings are equally up to par and interesting (especially “Absent the Man” and “The High Five Hall of Famers”). I’m really grateful Bob pulled back the veil to allow this glimpse, because it makes ABC thoroughly unique as a GBV album. The best offerings from Bob himself are the opener and closer (“5 Degrees on the inside” and “Escape to Phoenix”), and while there are several other choice cuts (“Cheap Buttons,” the acoustic “Whole Tomatoes”, and the bluesy, falling to pieces “Keep Me Down”), this LP is so thematically and sonically sprawling that it seems more like a compilation than a proper GBV album.
13. Tremblers by Goggles and Rank (2022)
The hypnotic, Devo-like “Lizard on a Red Brick Wall,” the Big Star double tribute “Alex Bell,” and the menacing builder “Unproductive Funk” kick off Tremblers by Goggles and Rank with an absolutely wonderful 1-2-3 punch, but this LP unfortunately loses a lot of momentum as it unevenly progresses towards the end. The second half twin-bill of the creepily cool character study “Cartoon Fashion (Bongo Lake)” and the mesmerizing harmonized jangle of “Boomerang” are two real bright spots, but the weaker run of three songs at the end leaves just a bit to be desired, especially with the final song “Who Wants to Go Hunting” clocking in at a very deliberate 6:17.
12. Surrender Your Poppy Field (2020)
Surrender Your Poppy Field is like a dusty victrola playing a retrofitted suite of old school GBV, with a very welcome return to some of the more pure lo-fi style that made the band so initially beloved. Many of the songs included here sound more like an unearthed Suitcase from 19 something and 5 than an album recorded and released in 2020. Buried drums, distorted guitars, and muddied-up vocals (“Year of the Hard Hitter,” “Queen Parking Lot,” “Always Gone”) give those would-be relics a comfortable, familiar luster, which in turn flow pretty seamlessly with the more produced vignettes, like the slow, gorgeous “Volcano,” the bright pulsing “Physician,” and the chugging cruncher “Man Called Blunder.” I couldn’t resist adding “Woah Nelly” to the playlist, one of those irresistible one-minute slivers Pollard snatches from the universe so effortlessly.
11. It’s Not Them. It Couldn’t Be Them. It Is Them. (2021)
After kicking off with the very oddball, almost anti-GBV sounding opener “Spanish Coin,” the twin rockers “High in the Rain” and “Dance of Gurus” are both immediate, fantastically polished gems ready-made for blasting on repeat. It’s Not Them… definitely wins for most interesting title - Pollard wanted to originally use this exact phrase in a 2001 marketing campaign as an acknowledgement to the then-dizzying slew of releases - but it’s a bit all over the place with its schizophrenic sequence. The midsection veers from haunting keyboard lilt (“Maintenance Man of the Haunted House”) to fast-paced burner (“I Share a Rhythm”) to a capella chant (“Razor Bug”), and while that sometimes works on other LPs, here it leaves me feeling disoriented. Second half highlights include the fun rocker “I Wanna Monkey” and the ultra-watery “The Bell Gets Out of the Way.” Don’t miss out on “Black and White Eyes in a Prism” either - it features a fantastic symphonic arrangement. The very best song, “My (Limited) Engagement” is bewilderingly saved for last on this album.
10. How Do You Spell Heaven (2017)
How Do You Spell Heaven is a cheery, bright affair, perhaps the most sunny, acoustic-tinged treble-dominated release GBV has produced in this era. If the predecessor August By Cake was sprawling and all-encompassing, HDYSH champions precision, clarity, and just lets the songs speak for themselves. While there aren’t many songs that made my playlist, there are several very good offerings. I really enjoy listening to this album as a whole, as it moves really well through the entire sequence. For my money, the album gets significantly better as it moves along, really taking off with the excellent slice of rock “Diver Dan” and not giving an inch in quality all the way through album closer “Just to Show You.” One of my very favorite tracks, the instrumental tour-de-force “Pearly Gates Smoke Machine” showcases the band flexing its performance muscles.
9. Mirrored Aztec (2020)
When this album dropped, I was absolutely thrilled to see my very favorite suitcase 1 track, “Bunco Men,” featured right near the top of the track listing. There are a few lyrical changes on this version, but otherwise it’s identical to the one I fell in love with in 2000. “To Keep an Area” is truly one of Pollard’s best recent songs, beaming through the speakers as a shimmering jewel of a lyrical confessional. Amazingly, it navigates several cut-time and dropped-beat measures utterly seamlessly, while the guitar break is a melodic cornucopia reminiscent of Gillard’s best guitar work on 1999’s incredible Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department. “Please Don’t Be Honest” contains a muscular verse riff that would be enough to carry an entire GBV song, but the chamber pop bridge Pollard unexpectedly inserts transforms the work from straight rocker to a makeshift genius collage, perhaps his own micro-version of a Brian Wilson pocket symphony. “Lip Curlers” is another highlight, a welcome dose of verse-chorus-bridge rock interplay, and ballad “Thank You Jane” is a surprisingly earnest tip of gratitude to a progressive icon. Overall, with 18 tracks, this release contains a haul of great tracks (don’t miss out on “Haircut Sphinx” and “A Whale is Top Notch”) but also a few that I end up skipping. And for the record… I do enjoy the rather polarizing “Math Rock,” cheesy kid chorus, horny guitar work and all.
8. Sweating the Plague (2019)
More progressive than its predecessor Warp and Woof, Sweating the Plague is a beautifully constructed patchwork of jagged, dense collages rich with deep-toned, earthen guitar riffs. Some of the architecture on the more ambitious tracks (“Mother’s Milk Elementary,” “The Very Second”) leaves the meat of the songs a little elusive for my taste, but when this band kicks in the pure old-school rock mode with the two massive heavies (“Ego Central High” and “Immortals”), the results are absolutely undeniable. Other highlights include lead single “Heavy Like The World” a shimmering, brilliantly reassembled pop rock masterpiece from another era (‘80s era outtake “I Choose You” on Suitcase 2), and the Kevin March-led, rollicking “Your Cricket Is Rather Unique” equal parts infectious and driving. “Downer,” “Street Party,” and recent live staple “Unfun Glitz” just missed the playlist, but are well worth checking out, and don’t miss out on the brilliant full-band climax near the end of album closer “Sons of the Beard.” Overall, StP is an extremely solid effort with just a couple of weak tracks.
7. Styles We Paid For (2020)
The loosest and grooviest set of the bunch, Styles We Paid For centers space and dynamics as much as the tunes themselves, creating a warm, lush environment for the listener to stretch their ears out while floating on a sonic hammock. The unique percussion and drum arrangements of “Never Abandon Ship” and “Crash at Placebo Lake” breathe comfortably under propelling guitar hooks to create a hypnotic sonic tapestry, which Pollard then paints over like a skilled master with his excellent lead vocal delivery. “Slaughterhouse” is reminiscent of the twin epic centerpieces of the Isolation Drills-UTAC era (“The Enemy” and “Car Language”) teasing a very deliberate build and imaginative melodic guitar phrasing. “Endless Seafood” follows as an excellent nugget of traditional mid-tempo GBV pop fare, brimming with a wonderful acoustic treatment, while lead single and live staple “Mr. Child” rocks hard with some excellent electric guitar interplay between Bare and Gillard. “Electronic Windows to Nowhere” offers a fantastic vocal melody sitting on top of a palm-muted guitar track lifted straight from the playbook of the 1978 version of The Cars and Cheap Trick. SWPF rates so highly in my book because it is an absolutely brilliant set of songs with a well-executed thematic core that is cohesively arranged throughout the entire effort, a hallmark of most of the top albums on my list.
6. Earth Man Blues (2021)
This time capsule of a concept musical drips retro ‘60s psychedelic at the edges, with plenty of my favorite tracks (“I Bet Hippy,” “The Disconnected Citizen,” “Made Man”) featuring vocals drowned in classic big-room reverb while twanging guitars bounce springingly with bright, sun-splashed tones. Three straightforward rockers explode off the speakers in the center of it all (“The Batman Sees the Ball,” “Margaret Middle School,” and the relentless “Trust Them Now”) anchoring the heart of this album with an equally strong, athletic rock pulse. The apex of this album is the impossibly delicate “How Can a Plumb be Perfected?” but what really makes this album a cut above, and what brings it all together for me is the interstitial concept pieces (“Sunshine Hello,” “Dirty Kid School”) of this nostalgic trip, which feature some of the most truly endearing earworms of the effort.
5. Welshpool Frillies (2023)
The blistering live-in-the-studio approach to Welshpool Frillies is what makes it one of the very best recent GBV albums. You can hear the band ebb and flow around the beat together in a truly organic way, especially on no-frills rock adventures such as “Romeo Surgeon,” “Awake Man,” and “Meet the Star.” All three tracks are four-star efforts that demonstrate how well the album holds together like a delicious stew simmered at just the right temperature for several hours. The huge central guitar riff on “Cruisers’ Cross” creates a captivating pulse for the whole band to channel a smooth masterpiece of pure hypnosis. Later in the album, “Better Odds” is one of those tunes you can’t believe Robert Pollard hasn’t already written, a three-chord ditty with an easy delivery of a perfectly constructed vocal melody and impressively direct (but nonetheless literate and heartfelt) lyric. “Animal Concentrate,” “Cats on Heat,” and “Rust Belt Boogie” are also brilliant slabs of high caliber rock and roll. The only mark against the otherwise perfect WF is the juxtaposition of “Chain Dance” and “Why Won’t You Kiss Me,” which feature extremely similar riffs, coming off as a bit distracting, even though both songs are wonderful pieces when taken separately.
4. Strut of Kings (2024)
The newest GBV album is the shortest, most compact release of this era, and one of the best sequenced, taking you through the many different aspects of Guided by Voices’ sound with a throughline that feels almost unconscious in delivery. Strut of Kings not only encompasses all of the incredible features of the band’s current sound, but also conjures foundational elements of GBV’s extremely underrated first four LPs. Opener and imaginative mini-suite “Show Me the Castle” is a deft tour through multiple moon phases of similar chord changes, almost like an unfinished overture for the album to follow. “Dear Onion” follows as chunky set of supple riffage featuring a great Lennon-like psych melody, and two tracks later, triumphant clean-up hitter “Fictional Environment Dream” harkens back to the writing style of ‘80s releases Forever Since Breakfast or Sandbox, with Pollard summoning up a big, rare steak of straight power pop with a great vocal melody and a stately arrangement. “Fictional” is almost like a lost Badfinger or Big Star classic, with the band nailing the execution effortlessly. In terms of the bigger picture, the symmetry of Strut of Kings is one of its most fascinating aspects, with propulsive and infectious twin hard-rock engines “Olympus Cock in Radiana” and “Cavemen Running Naked” nestled sequentially around the urgent, eerie Same Place the Fly Got Smashed-sounding album centerpiece “Leaving Umbrella” while the twin acoustic ballads “This Will Go On” and “Bit of a Crunch” are both evenly spaced in the sequence as well; three tracks from the start and three tracks from the end. All five of these pieces are absolutely extraordinary, elevating the album to a very high rating. “Olympus” shows off the band’s progressive tendencies with its seven-note earworm riff, while “Cavemen” demonstrates the lineup’s pure thunder in a much more simple manner. “Leaving” generates plenty of menacing atmosphere in a way not often seen since the desperate moments of “Airshow ‘88.” Most impressively, both aforementioned ballads feature truly dynamic arrangements that leave just enough space for some of Pollard’s most personal lyrics, and one can’t help but wonder if they are somewhat bare meditations on the dusk stage of life and his reflections on mortality. Lead single “Serene King,” the most immediate hit, is a late album grand slam, featuring a stunningly exuberant, catchy chorus and the band firing on all cylinders. SoK is a pure joy to listen to front to back, with not a single bad track in the sequence.
3. Space Gun (2018)
The first truly great album of the New Classic Lineup is a streamlined, infectious juggernaut full of absolute bangers. The title track soars through the speakers as the album’s opener, galloping through the gates of the album’s entrance like a lost herald of The Who. “Colonel Paper,” the ultimate second song on a GBV album, struts in next as a rough-hewn lanky, swaggering, and unfinished Stonesy sendup of a hilarious debate between Greg Demos and Bob about last night’s chicken’s edible qualities in relation to their proximity to a dumpster. And the hits just don’t stop. This album simply never lets up in terms of quality and catchiness, with backing vocals and irresistible countermelodies taking center stage on many of the LP’s numerous hits. The four-song colossus including “See My Field,” “Liars Box,” “Blink Blank,” and “Daily Get Ups” might just be the best middle of the lineup batting order Pollard has ever assembled. I do love kangaroos, as the song suggests (even if some don’t), and “Sport Component National” plays in my head constantly (SCN is on again!). However, it’s “That’s Good” at the zenith; an unbelievable orchestration and arrangement by Doug Gillard set to of the most earnest and moving ballads about ambition and artistry I’ve ever heard. Almost every song on Space Gun could go on my playlist, and it was hard to pare it down to just the many songs included.
2. Warp and Woof (2019)
My sentimental favorite album of this era…. isn’t even an album! Well, sort of. Warp and Woof reimagines four 6-song EPs released in early 2019 into a re-sequenced full-length masterpiece of an afterthought. Pollard’s process has always been to refine; his collage-like work-in-progress approach permeates many mutating versions of albums. If we’re being honest, though, the more he tinkers with things, typically the better they get. In retrospect, this type of album was probably always inevitable with that in mind, but it’s an utter joy that it came at this stage of his career, as the sequence of these songs is the thing that sends it absolutely over the top. Warp and Woof not only succeeds in its pure sub-two-minute whippet-like hits (“My Angel,” “Cohesive Scoops,” “Dead Liquor Store,” “Tiny Apes”) but also manages to showcase the linking mood pieces vital to any great GBV album in utterly new, imaginative ways (“Mumbling Amens,” “Out of the Blue Race,” “Foreign Deputies,” “Cool Jewels and Aprons”). There’s an ebb & flow to this journey, allowing the heavy hitters to bang and drive the body, while the little links in between them swell and bubble in the listener’s brain. I rated this near the top because more than any other album from this era, I always dig listening to it front to back, and I never skip a song…because there simply isn’t a bad one on this record. In an experience reminiscent of landmark album Alien Lanes; time simply evaporates when I listen to Warp and Woof, and I vibe with the many colors and feelings of all 24 tracks.
1. Nowhere to Go But Up (2023)
The most complete and comprehensive statement of the New Classic era, Nowhere to Go But Up is an expertly crafted distillation of every flavor imaginable in the GBV World of Fun into 11 complete songs. “The Race Is On, The King Is Dead” is the most surefire hit single Pollard has written since “Glad Girls,” brimming with his trademark observational wit and more hooks than a fisherman’s tacklebox. “Stabbing at Fractions,” “Puncher’s Parade,” and “Local Master Airplane” provide the straightforward rock muscle every proper GBV cocktail must contain, while “How Did He Get Up There?” blends Pollard’s penchant for nursery rhyme lyrical cadence with a driving rhythm, which gives way to progressive touches and the arrangement flourishes hinted at on more recent releases. The most interesting material comes late in this album; “Jack of Legs,” “For the Home,” and “Cruel for Rats” take the listener through micro-dosed movements of rock, psychedelia, acoustic home recording, and full blown string arrangement in an utterly groundbreaking, thoroughly imaginative way. Front to back, NTGBU is absolutely brilliant, without a single bad track, and is an unbelievable testament to the startling fact that 40 years on, Guided by Voices and Robert Pollard - astonishingly - are continuing to get better.
Matt Walters is a retired professional poker player, entertainment industry Union organizer, bassist and guitarist of badcandy, and the songwriter, vocalist, stickest and frontman of MT Walls. When not negotiating, recording, or performing, he is typically found at Galloping Ghost in Brookfield, Illinois, setting high scores on obscure Japanese arcade games. He still resides in Oak Park, IL, after all these years, and is occasionally persuaded to write about music.