Purchase, Guided By Voice's Lips of Steel
To pinpoint one song in the vast pantheon that Guided By Voices has
written and recorded over 30 years is a little like that proverbial needle that
got lost in the haystack.
“Lips of Steel” comes from their second album, 1987’s Sandbox,
and stands as the perfect introduction to GBV’s unique, and now singularly
owned style and sound. At 1:33 playing time, the song is: lo-fi, guitar-driven,
amped up and hook-laden power pop, recorded through a tape player and sounding
as if being played at the world’s greatest underwater stadium, by an oddly
unique version of every great arena-rock band you've ever fist pumped along to, who just happened
to have bought their instruments at the toy store on their way to a Dungeon’s
and Dragons tournament being held in the dingy backroom of a great ABC store. Beer
soaked, impossible to truly define, led by a former middle school teacher,
covering a vast and vastly odd exhibition of acid-trip, tongue-tied, four-eyed
images and ideas, GBV is a puzzle in a maze in a cork-screw universe of every
teenage boy’s tennis-racket guitar and hairbrush microphone bedroom fantasy
concert. To see them live is to be a convert; to introduce them to the
unbaptized makes one a beneficent saint.
Guided By Voices? 25 albums, 39 singles and EPs, 7 box
sets. 2 books. 2,000 plus songs. A lovingly devoted following of numbers-obsessed statisticians/fans (GBVDB.com). GBV occupies a universe of its own unique universe. Their just released August by Cake is lead singer Robert
Pollard’s 100th studio album and the band’s first double album. Prolific
is a failure of semantics. Not everything is great, nor could it be with this
much material. But when GBV hits the mark, it’s electric. If you’ve never
listened to GBV, start anywhere, work your way through in any order. You’ll
find a least a few ear-worm favorites; you’ll recognize not a few rock clichés redone
to perfection; you’ll discover a universe of music you never knew could
happen. For the uninitiated, “Lips of Steel” is a great starting point. Happy
traveling.
