Yet another fucking Guided By Voices album, the cunts

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

Cool Planet, 18 tracks. No, they haven't gone in a new Eurodisco direction.

[Nice Relaxing Poo]

I have a couple of GBV albums and the sheer lack of quality control just gets on my tits.

[Paaaaul]

I reckon this current phase of GBV is producing the best albums they ever have.
Class Clown, Bears For Lunch and Motivational Jumpsuit are really exceptional, and the others have all been at least excellent. I think a major reason for this is the quality of Tobin Sprout songwriting. His songs on the 90s albums are always the weak points on the albums for me, but his songs are now on a near equal level to those of Bobby P.

I have a couple of GBV albums and the sheer lack of quality control just gets on my tits.

I used to think the quality control was a problem, but once I really clicked with GBV I found that everything on their albums has a place and that the way Bob uses tracks as buffers and to help shape the whole pieces is part of his genius. I owned From A Compound Eye for about 6 years, and loved a lot of the individual tracks, before it clicked in toto a couple of years ago and I now think it's the greatest rock album I've heard. Bob's effortlessly poppy songs can fool you into thinking that his albums are less complicated than they actually are, and the reward for persisting with them is so worthwhile. Having said that, I don't think he really started totally nailing the flow on his albums until about 1999/2000 though - Kid Marine and Isolation Drills are the ones where he seems to have found the secret as far as I'm concerned. Up to that point the albums feel more like collections of (superb) songs to me than whole pieces.

Which albums did you get Nice Relaxing Poo? Popular consensus seems to be that Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes are the best place to start but I genuinely think that the six newest albums are all better than those two, however good the individual tracks on those two are.

[Tiny Poster]

Simon Reynolds nailed GBV almost twenty years ago:

GBV is basically America's very own Oasis. Both bands are led by incorrigibly incontinent songwriters who are morbidly obsessed with English rock of the mid-to-late Sixties, and who have nothing to say but insist on saying it.

[Paaaaul]

That wasn't true, even at that point. Yes, The Beatles and The Who were strong influences, but just as much so were REM,the dBs, Wire, Magazine, The Stooges, Soft Machine and Devo.
I think it's clear Reynolds had only really listened to the Bee Thousand-->Under The Bushes period, 'cos the previous six albums didn't really have a noticeable UK sixties influence bar the odd bit of Townshend-esque guitar.

[phantom_power]

GBV are nothing like Oasis. They are more like the American The Fall, very prolific, dubious quality control, ploughing a similar furrow each time

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

GBV are nothing like Oasis. They are more like the American The Fall, very prolific, dubious quality control, ploughing a similar furrow each time

Yep.

I wouldn't trust Simon Reynolds to get his mum's name right. He is only author whose work I opened at random and spotted a mistake - and it was concerning something that came out in 1992.

[Funcrusher]

Yep.

I wouldn't trust Simon Reynolds to get his mum's name right. He is only author whose work I opened at random and spotted a mistake - and it was concerning something that came out in 1992.

He disses Carl Craig in his 'Energy Flash' thing, so fuck him. I have never heard Guided By Voices.

[PaulTMA]

Even illegally downloading their recent output has been too hard to keep up with.

[Head Gardener]

I did a mix last year featuring some of my faves and padded it out with
other bits and bobs, I have big love for them - especially live!
their new album has some great stuff on it, as they all do really to be honest

http://www.mixcloud.com/Gardener/gbv-mix/

[kaprisky]

Ever since the reformation I wanted to see if I could collect all the 7'' singles issued, figuring that they would disappear quickly. I was right.

I managed to get all of them from Let's Go Eat the Factory to English Little League (plus Down by the Racetrack on CD), but then I could only get 3 of the 5 off of Motivational Jumpsuit and none from Cool Planet.

All the comeback albums are good but demand persistence. Class Clown would be my pick.

[chand]

I'm out of the loop to the extent that I thought 'Universal Truths & Cycles' and 'Earthquake Glue' were fairly recent albums by them, apparently they disappeared, came back and released seven more albums since then.

[phantom_power]

...and that was just last year

[scarecrow]

The bastards have disbanded again.

http://gbv.com/tour.php

[Paaaaul]

I got the new Teenage Guitar album yesterday which should help fill the gap. I hope Bob can come back with something as strong as Compound Eye this time around.

[scarecrow]

The trouble with his solo stuff is that the quality of each release depends on Todd Tobias. I love Compound Eye but merely like Space City Kicks, and I think this is mostly because Tobias put a lot more work into the former. I understand that Uncle Bob's demos are pretty scrappy and he doesn't seem to have much input regarding the arrangements on the solo records.

Perhaps he's agreed to a lucrative Boston Spaceships reunion.

[the science eel]

They are fucking shit. I wish they'd fuck off.