Wiki says they have 25 full length studio records. Over the past little while, around three months or so, I’ve been on a steady diet of one Guided by Voices record every two or three days. I just counted up the number of records I’ve listened to and it’s 35. According to wiki Pollard is a major contributor to 100 records now and has 2000 songs registered with Broadcast Music, Inc. It's my sincere intention to listen to everything he’s ever recorded because there is no one in the history of pop music with anywhere close to quantity of very very high quality songs. It’s insane. On those 35 Guided by Voices records it's machine gun fire great hooks and great melodies. He (and to a degree they) rip them out, and they have so many they’ve started the next one before you even know they threw the last one out.
Going through the discography is a must because it’s the magnitude of it that forces you to gape in awe of the beauty. It’s like hiking in the Grand Canyon. There’s gems of beauty around every corner but the astonishing thing is to look over the edge and let the incredible enormity of the thing wash over you. Guided by Voices is the Grand Canyon of rock’n’roll bands.
The lo-fi apparently unfinished approach isn’t rebellious, by the time of Alien Lanes, 20 years since the Sex Pistols there’s nothing to rebel against. They’re not commenting on earlier approaches they’re presenting the same product in musical shorthand. It works so well because we know the influences so well. They present you with the crucial emotional moments of Tommy or Revolver without all the fanfare but not because the fanfare is pompous. They understand the fanfare is great. They’re actually using all the production and buildup and bridges built by The Who and the Beatles to take us to the GBV moments of glory. It doesn’t need to be recreated because Tommy and Revolver are already imprinted in our DNA. Those hooks wouldn’t work if their predecessors hadn’t already guided us there.
No one else has done anything like this. It’s an extension of classic rock that seems like indie but it’s really classic rock because it can only be understood completely if your mind can fill in what’s not there. And you have to be very well versed in the music it’s built on to do that. You have to hear what isn’t there and it’s not there because you don’t need to hear it again. You got it.
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