Steel: Guided By Voices,Lips of Steel

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 100^th 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.

The Plant Kingdom: I Am a Tree; The Trees

Guided By Voices: I am a Tree

[purchase]


Rush: The Trees

[purchase]

Most songwriters are not scientists, and vice versa. It’s probably just as well. But sometimes words get in the way of scientific fact.

Would trees survive “I have the leaves that fall off when winds blow by”? Or “I will break before I bend”? Questions, questions… But it is a great song anyway, originally from the under-appreciated Mag Earwhig, and also included on the “best of” Human Amusements at Hourly Rates. The song is by Doug Gillard, a collaborator of Robert Pollard in this particular iteration of Guided by Voices, after Pollard disbanded the “classic lineup” responsible for Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes.

And I don’t know much about Rush other than the “hits,” but the first song made me think of the second for some reason. This tune recounts a struggle between maples and oaks. Here in eastern North America, many oak species are long lived, but less shade-tolerant than sugar maple, which may replace them in dominating a forest over the long term, given moist conditions and a lack of disturbance. But here the trees “are all kept equal by hatchet, ax, and saw…”

Guest post by Paul T

The Aristocrats: King And Caroline

Guided By Voices - King And Caroline [purchase]

The drunken jesters of the Indie Rock Empire wax rhapsodic about the aristocracy. One of GBV's many perfect vignettes, it has several appealing elements: A killer bass line, the wobbly harmony between the bass and guitar, Bob Pollard's keening voice, especially at the "Overrun by the rank/Roll over like an egg" line, and Tobin Sprout's vocal harmonies coming in at the coda. 94 seconds of perfectly skewed pop economy.

And the wisdom they will sell ...