Guided by Voices returns to the indie leagues
by Matthew T. Everett
The critical response to Guided by Voices' latest album, Universal Truths and Cycles, has been nearly unanimous: after the well-intentioned missteps of Do the Collapse and Isolation Drills (both recorded for TVT, a small company with big-label aspirations), the band has returned to its old label, Matador, and recaptured the intimate, lo-fi sound and endearingly scattershot songwriting that helped GBV define indie rock in the mid-1990s.
Universal Truths sounds more like GBV albums Bee Thousand or Under the Bushes Under the Stars, than either of its more polished predecessors. It has a raw, unproduced familiarity and a couple of the short 60-second bursts of unmediated id that made up much of the earliest GBV records.
"We just wanted to produce ourselves again," says guitarist Doug Gillard. "It wasn't a conscious decision to return to a lo-fi sound. We always wanted to record an album that way, and not worry whether the mix was perfect or not. We all like albums that are erratic, where every song sounds like it's from a different session."
Guided by Voices won thousands of fans with the almost homemade quality of its early recordings. Singer/songwriter Robert Pollard recorded the first handful of GBV cassettes at his house in Dayton, Ohio. But the same willfully eccentric imagination that steers GBV from pop to hard rock didn't want to rest. Gillard says the lo-fi production was, at least at first, a financial necessity. When the band had a chance to record with a big budget, they took it.
"Being on TVT wasn't a big awful thing," he says. "There were some gripes and annoyances, but compared with being on a real major label, TVT's probably as good as you could ask for. It just got so the head of the label wanted to have a say in the sequencing, and there was a certain mix on 'Hold on Heart' [from Do the Collapse] they wanted, a radio mix. We had to put our foot down. They ultimately deferred to our wishes, but they didn't push the record all that much as a result. It wasn't really that bad."
While Gillard wasn't entirely satisfied with the results of working with producers Ric Ocasek (on Do the Collapse) and Rob Schnapf (on Isolation Drills), and he's pleased with the unvarnished sound of Universal Truths, he says he and Pollard have always been uneasy carrying the flag for indie rock.
"We've never really had that mindset. Bob definitely never has," he says. "He just likes rock. He just likes music. Old school fans point to Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes days and compare everything to that. But the band wasn't much like that before and we haven't been much like that after."
Gillard, who joined Guided by Voices in 1996, says part of the reason Pollard asked him to stay was that he wanted a more prominent lead guitar in the band. Gillard says he's surprised lead guitar carries the stigma it does among hip indie fans, when the bands who carved out the genre—Superchunk, Dinosaur Jr., the Pixies, and even Pavement—are all guitar bands.
"A lot of their leads are more wanky than mine," he says. "But no one ever accuses Superchunk of being too 'rock-ist.' I think if they're done tastefully guitar solos are great. My favorite thing to do is play pretty chords, but if I can play leads, why not throw them in?"
On Universal Truths, the lead guitar is more pronounced than it ever was on the records it's compared to. It's tempting to think of it not as a return but as a culmination of all the different directions Guided by Voices has followed in the last 15 years— quirky and anthemic, pop and punk rock, polished and raw, all at the same time.
That's exactly the wrong approach. Each record isn't really part of an evolution; it stands on its own, a document of the particular process the band followed when making it.
Pollard is one of the most promiscuous songwriters around. He releases a flood of GBV singles and side projects, and some GBV albums have 20 or more songs, many of them fragmentary, as if they popped out of his head exactly the way they sound on record. The Suitcase box set, released in 2000, had 100 unreleased songs on four discs.
"He has an active imagination," Gillard says. "His mind is always going. He's always thinking of titles and lyrics and writing things down. He has a muse that comes from somewhere."
October 24, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 43
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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