Guided By Voices
Earthquake Glue (2003)
Grade: A-
Boy, it must be tough to be the dad of a younger Guided By Voices fan these days. These fanatical, GBV whupper-snappers must look at their balding, square, overweight, Supertramp-listening pop and think, "Man, if I could only have Robert Pollard as my old man!"
Pollard, ever-dominating voice and songwriter for the age-old Guided By Voices, will turn 47 years old on Halloween of this year...and he's probably just created one of his finest rock'n'roll albums. The ex-schoolteacher (bet you already knew that!) and infamous drunken fool is back for his someteenth album and, by my clock, it's one of his best. All right, all right...I'm not a GBV head (in fact, I got a little uneasy when I went and saw them live at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland a few years ago, surrounded by cultish GBV behavior and all), so I may not be the authority on the subject. But, that said, Earthquake Glue is easily one of the most listenable albums that GBV has put out in many a year...and that's saying a lot, right?
Catchy but crunchy, Pollard's songwriting seems to be honed in on a target this time out as he doesn't display his usual ADD tendency towards obnoxiously brief and forgettable little ditties. Oh sure, there's a few of those on Earthquake Glue, but the songs that dominate (The Best of Jill Hives, Useless Inventions) quickly brush off the ol' GBV misgivings that many of you may share with me and allow you to the let the old geezer do his dirty business all over ya.
Pollard has always been enigmatic, at best. His body of work, if displayed in graph form, would be staggeringly erratic. Propellor and Alien Lanes would snuggle near the top, and about seven albums would drop off the graph as nearly unlistenable indulgence. Earthquake Glue would fit somewhere in the upper echelon.
There are those that can sift through the garbage at the dump and find the gems at the bottom of the heap...for our purposes, let us call them GBV fans. And then there are those that lift a few piles of trash, see a couple of promising items, and then say "Fuck this, it mostly stinks." I would have fallen in the latter category before the release of Earthquake Glue. And, actually...I think I still am in the latter category...because, in order to have unevenness, there must be some high points, too. But, it is with much relief that I can absorb a GBV high point right now...because I was getting about as disenchanted with Robert Pollard as a 47-year-old is with partying. Or...well, you know what I mean. -Eric Morris
