This came out in 1999 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Guided By Voices are not your father’s rock ’n’ roll band … then again, on second thought, they basically are.
You see, once upon a time, frontman and chief songwriter Robert Pollard — who, for all intents and purposes, is Guided By Voices in the same way Trent Reznor is Nine Inch Nails — was a Grade 4 teacher in Dayton, Ohio. By day, he was a mild-mannered educator; at nights and weekends, he transformed into a rock star (at least in his own mind), rehearsing with his band, writing quirky little tunes — sometimes no longer than 20 or 30 seconds — and recording them in his basement.
For most aging wannabe rockers, this would be enough. But not Bob; he pressed his weird home tapes into self-released albums — five of them between 1987 and 1992. They all feature his odd mix of British Invasion pop melodies, psychedelic song snippets and hippy-dippy wordplay, delivered with garage-rock musicianship and indie-rock grit. Oh yeah: For some reason, Bob sings in a weird, pseudo-British accent. Who he thought would buy these albums is anybody’s guess; legend has it he ended up smashing many of them again a wall.
Luckily, some managed to find their way to the rock press, and not surprisingly, anybody this strange and obscure was bound to become a critics’ darling. Hyped by Spin and Rolling Stone (among others)‚ GBV slowly took off — but never stopped recording in Bob’s basement. In 1994 they made their breakthrough album, Bee Thousand; shortly afterward, Pollard quit teaching. Since then, they’ve made a bunch more records, and Pollard’s made noises about wanting to become a real rock star with gold records and stuff.
Which brings us to Do The Collapse, the first GBV album to be released on a major label, recorded in a real studio and groomed by a big-name producer — Ric Ocasek of The Cars. And, true to his word, Bob has issued his most pop-oriented, accessible album yet. In fact, it may even be his best album since Bee Thousand. But if I were him, I wouldn’t put that trophy case in the rec room just yet.
Here’s the problem: Despite GBV’s slicker new sound, despite the radio-friendly arrangements, despite the string section overdubs, it doesn’t seem Pollard has changed his simple-Simon approach to songwriting: You get the sense he still just bangs out a simple, garage-rock riff on the guitar, adds some cobbled-together lyrics (calling lines like “Dragons awake / Take me through the voodoo, Buddha” surreal is just being diplomatic) and basically just keeps going until he loses interest or the tape runs out. All he and Ocasek have really done here is take tunes that would have been 50 seconds long in the past and stretch them out to three minutes.
Don’t get me wrong; Bob’s stream-of-karma technique is what makes GBV great. And frankly, it’s kind of neat to hear them play a song that isn’t full of tape hiss and dropouts. And plenty of those new songs — like Teenage FBI, Hold On Hope and the cheeky Picture Me Big Time — are as good as anything he’s written. But somehow, I just don’t expect Do The Collapse to bump Offspring off your local FM-rock chart.
Still, if you haven’t heard GBV yet, you won’t find a safer place to start. And for fans, it’s a case of meet the new Bob — same as the old Bob.
