Way back in 1978, five years before Robert Pollard started his band Guided by Voices, the Dayton, Ohio, native was a legit Major League Baseball pitching hopeful, and he capped his college career with a no-hitter for his Division I alma mater Wright State. This is relevant not just because there’s a solid amount of crossover between baseball fans and GBV heads (though there is, and I represent that convergence), but also because a simple baseball analogy nicely describes Pollard’s absurdly prolific approach to making records.
Baseball is a game of failure. A player who can get a hit three times out of 10 has a good chance at a long, successful career. And those three hits are what people remember — not the seven misses. The staggering 100-plus releases under Pollard’s belt affirm this. (He crossed the triple-digit threshold with last year’s August by Cake, released about 10 months before his 60th birthday.) In spite of much of each record feeling half-formed — a funny title in search of a tune, or a good song that ends before it starts — the handful of quality tracks is always enough to justify the purchase, or at least the listen.
Yet for a band with so much music, the discussion always seems to come back to a pair of GBV records, both issued by indie-rock stalwart Matador Records during the genre’s mid-’90s heyday: 1994’s Bee Thousand and the following year’s Alien Lanes. Both albums were made for next to nothing, and they are the closest Pollard has gotten to batting a thousand, offering strong examples of his trademark punk-rock-meets-The Who songcraft and bizarre yet evocative lyricism. Filler is kept to a minimum, and Pollard’s songwriting foil at the time, his more straightforward and pop-minded bandmate Tobin Sprout, puts up good numbers as well, despite not getting as many at-bats. Their signature songs — Bee Thousand’s “Smothered in Hugs” and “Gold Star for Robot Boy,” Alien Lanes’ “Game of Pricks” and “Motor Away” — have remained staples in the group’s sets since pretty much the moment they were introduced.
Selecting a favorite GBV gem is, however, highly subjective. Seriously: Ask 10 fans to put all their picks on a disc or playlist, and you’re looking at somewhere between 200 and 300 different tracks. Just trying to catch up with the material Pollard has put out since 2010 (when the bandleader reinstated the GBV name after a five-year hiatus) is quite the task. In advance of writing this piece, I put a playlist together featuring the past eight years’ worth of GBV and Pollard solo material (they are more or less the same thing), which amounted to 12 hours of music. While it’s all decent-to-great, it’s also overwhelming. You almost have to be a die-hard to have the patience to try to pick out individual standouts.
But the band’s latest, Space Gun, offers up some unexpected late-career heroics. It connects for the same reasons that Pollard’s less-heralded early-to-mid-Aughts output is my personal fave: GBV’s Isolation Drills (2001) and Half-Smiles of the Decomposed (2004), and 2006’s Blues and Boogie Shoes under the Keene Brothers moniker (a sparkling power-pop collaboration with the late Tommy Keene, one of that style’s undisputed masters). This trifecta of albums brought to the table strong, focused, crisply recorded songs with emotional heft to match. They clocked in at three and four minutes instead of the usual one or two, showing what the golden-voiced Pollard can do when he reins in and refines some of his kitchen-sink tendencies. They met the listener halfway, rather than assuming or not caring whether one’s ears are calibrated for such lo-fi recordings.
Space Gun is like that too. While it’s the third album made by the current GBV lineup — which includes longtime Pollard colleagues Doug Gillard (guitar) and Kevin March (drums) but also some new blood in bassist Mark Shue and Nashville’s own Bobby Bare Jr. on guitar — it’s the first that truly feels like a full-band effort. Fist-pumping rockers like the opening title track mix tastefully with tender material (the cheeky “I Love Kangaroos”) and more experimental moments (the bobbing, weaving “Sport Component National” with its imagination-triggering lyric about a “Nashville spacesuit,” whatever that may be, and “That’s Good,” a surprising orchestral number on the record’s back half). The 15-song set is at once energetic and reflective, eccentric and palatable, funny and serious, and quintessentially GBV.
The ageless wonder Pollard might have a third golden era of albums in him yet. In any case, no matter what’s on the set list, or how old you are or how familiar you are with the catalog, Guided by Voices’ live shows are as reliably fun as it gets: booze-soaked celebrations of rock ’n’ roll showmanship, revelry and camaraderie at their most informal and pure. If Saturday’s gig is your first, be advised they always run extra innings, with sets that average between 50 and 60 songs. So don’t drink too quickly — and whatever you do, don’t try and keep pace with Pollard.
