REVIEW: Guided By Voices, Do the Collapse (TVT)
- Steve Kandell
After years of threatening to record an album that doesn't sound like it was recorded in a small bathroom, Dayton's frighteningly prolific lo-fi hero Robert Pollard has finally followed through with the brand new Do the Collapse. A few tips for those fans disenchanted with this decision:
1. Listen to Do the Collapse in a small bathroom.
2. Unplug at least one of your speakers while listening to Do the Collapse.
3. Turn your stereo up as loud as it can go, then listen to Do the Collapse from your next door neighbor's house. Guaranteed decline in fidelity.
4. Make a cassette copy of Do the Collapse and only listen to it on one of those mono tape recorders from 1979.
As ludicrous as these suggestions may sound, all are preferable to dismissing the new Guided By Voices (GBV) album outright, as tempting as that may seem to the hardcore faithful. While Ric Ocasek's production undoubtedly gives the music a sheen it has never had, this is still at its core a GBV album, complete with willfully obscure lyrics and faux-British Invasion intonations. Nowhere is the former Cars leader's stamp more evident than on the album's opening track, "Teenage FBI," which boasts synth bass and enough keyboard flourishes to make it sound like a refugee from Candy-O, or maybe the first Rentals album.
Do the Collapse's most obvious departure is the lighter-waving, arm-swaying, strings-enhanced arena rock ballad "Hold On Hope," a bid for Top 40 glory that couldn't be more blatant if it came with a box of chocolates for your local radio programmer. But it's hard to knock Pollard for this. He's written and released about three thousand songs in the past eight years; he's allowed to want a hit, and he's certainly worked hard enough for it. Anyway, the idea of Guided By Voices actually gaining mainstream acceptance, of "Hold On Hope" becoming a prom theme standard or popping up on the soundtrack of a very special episode of Dawson's Creek, is too brilliant to resist. Fans can take great solace in the fact that this will never, ever happen.
Less a band than a brand, Pollard has changed GBV members so frequently that Andy Warhol's legendary aphorism might be amended to "In the future, everyone will be in Guided By Voices for fifteen minutes." It is becoming increasingly hard to discern what makes an album a Robert Pollard solo effort (he's released two) or a Guided By Voices project (counts range from 13 to 16, depending on what you're calling an "album.") It seems as if Pollard himself isn't sure either; the low-fi fragments that used to comprise GBV albums are now saved for his solo records as he tries push Guided By Voices towards greater pop legitimacy. This time around, former Breeder/Amp Jim MacPherson plays drums, part-time GBV associate and full-time Dayton attorney Greg Demos plays bass, and guitarist Doug Gilliard is the sole survivor from the Mag Earwhig band of two years ago. (Just to keep things confusing, the album photos show no less than six current GBV'ers, including touring bassist Tim Tobias and touring rhythm guitarist Nate Farley, also late of the Breeders and the Amps.)
What Ocasek seems to have done is rein in Pollard's tendency to leave songs half-finished, as Do the Collapse boasts sixteen full-blown pop songs -- no fragments -- many of which are more than three minutes long. A few, such as the mid-tempo "Things I Will Keep" and "Liquid Indian" hold up against any in the stunningly large GBV catalogue, and "In Stitches" is the best one-chord GBV tune since "Postal Blowfish." And for those who simply cannot abide by this new trend towards more conventional pop composition, a new Pollard solo album or one of his collections under the pseudonym Lexo and the Leapers is due to be released in about twenty minutes.
