[rating=9.00]
For a celebrated rock band that’s by now old far enough to order a Miller at the bar, Guided by Voices have always had a weird shyness about releasing a big-time, polished rock record, start to finish, full stop. Space Gun, the group’s most consistent album to date, is that record.
It’s not that Robert Pollard and his long-running band haven’t come really close. Their first slick musical reinvention, the Ric Ocasek-helmed Do The Collapse (1999), featured music commercially accessible enough to soundtrack film and TV like NCAA Football and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but was lessened by its claustrophobic production. Its follow-up, Isolation Drills (2001), halted its glorious high fidelity for the slightly self-conscious tape-recorded acoustic guitar interlude “Frostman,” as if these Midwesterners were to say, “Look, we haven’t gotten a big head or anything.”
This isn’t exactly a bad thing, and I imagine there are GBV fans who would see me as heretical for questioning “Frostman.” But it speaks to a certain longing in the group’s fanbase that’s been fitfully fulfilled. This is part of what makes Space Gun so thrilling. It’s an exhilarating rush of well-oiled playing, great production and even better tunes, and it displays the tightest-ever Guided by Voices lineup at full bore.
More than on any other GBV album, Space Gun has got an interstellar fascination and a curiosity about the future. Pollard’s word bank has become paranoid and suspicious of our data-bloated modern world. “It’s no fun being lost in a make-believe city,” Pollard sings in the standout single “See My Field.” “The Star Wars people look and laugh.”
Elsewhere, the backing players have expanded their toolkit, finding better ways to integrate outré, electronic textures while not interrupting the flow. This rings true for returning guitarist Doug Gillard, who is a huge presence here as an arranger — check out the swelling Mellotron on “That’s Good,” a lost Pollard ballad rescued from the Suitcase demo compilations and given a bath, shave and a haircut. Gillard also includes found sounds in unique ways — the whining paper-towel dispenser in the title track, the silly, chirping cat toy at the top of “I Love Kangaroos,” the white noise that consumes “Hudson Rake.”
So, this is something like the the one hundred and second Pollard album, with the promise of another double album in 2019. How do we process this one? It’s a fulfilled campaign promise, in a way. It delivers on the awe-inspiring noise of the group’s greatest lineup to date on record. It captures our era in only the most Pollardian way. And although we might get hit with yet another album faster than a speeding bullet, Space Gun is a zippy, exhilarating gem on its own terms.
