C or D : Guided By Voices.

Love them, saw them twice pre-breakup and I think I'm good.

(Xpost)
This is why I restrict, with very rare exceptions, my current live music outings to jazz in its many forms and opera in which venues, among other niceties, the audience has learned to cover up its moontan with long sleeves instead of highlighting it with black rock T-shirts. Of course when streaming into headphones, it's a completely different story, the same old National Hits Day.

Are you sure that's not the band you're talking about rather than the crowd?

Jazz club audiences tend to talk too much, maybe too exhilarated by the music, like one drink drunks---or just because that's what they always do in clubs. I've heard famous musos puzzle over this, considering how much the yakkers have to pay to get in, sometimes. Maybe this has changed with cell phones? More about taking pix and trying to capture the whole thing on audio-video, and texting friends about the fabulous show happening right now? I dunno; the talking got me out of the clubs.
Anyway, I liked Pollard's Of Course You Are better than latest (?) GBV. Sent the avclub stream link to a friend who hadn't heard him or them, with my comment: def for fans of Robyn Hitchcock, early 70s Nilsson---first tracks sound like it's gonna be all hard rock, but much more variety overall, kinda psych-pop. He liked it.

was jamming "Everyone Thinks I'm A Raincloud" this morning and it's such a good song, one of the few post-90s ones that would be in play for a POX for me

on the other hand, i've finally listened to all the reunion albums and they're mostly half-baked and depressing, i kinda wish they had been released under a sideproject name - the hit rate is even lower than a lot of solo pollard

Jazz club audiences tend to talk too much,
Really haven't experienced this very often

i go to all sorts of shows and generally refuse to be intimidated by any audience even if i am by myself, but i can't say that about a gbv show. it will be full of 2x/yr partiers who are trying to cram 6 months of drinking into four hours. that's the audience i expect at a current day gbv show and therefore no can do

ya know, maybe it's b/c i read the replacements bio fairly recently, but the extent to which pollard's drunkenness is part of the appeal for a lot of the crowd did bum me out a little. i know he claims in interviews to not really have a drinking problem, but...

there was never a time, not even in their earliest years, when the extent of pollard's drunkenness wasn't completely depressing. it's generally fun for the first 2 or 3 beers, and completely not fun for the next 20 or 30. and those 2 or 3 beers take maybe 2 or 3 songs to consume. and they're short songs.

disclosure: i haven't seen 'em in a long time, so maybe things have changed, but based on the above posts, i'm assuming they've gotten worse, not better, which is all but unfathomable to me. sigh.

Don't most GBV shows go off without major hitch or embarrassment? Amazingly, I've never seen 'em but I'm planning on it in August.

btw I'm totally a 2x/year guy but I just don't drink heavy anymore, ever

grain of salt since i haven't seen them live in forever but i kind of admire pollard's self-destructiveness the way i do keef's

I don't. I think it's depressing.

yeah shit's not good. irl consequences.

The last time I saw them was the ass end of the Doug Hillard era and it was some sad shit, bass player also borrowed my friend's rig (his band opened and somehow GBV didn't bring a bass rig?) and turned the head up way too high and blew his cab, they literally asked the crowd if anyone had coke

Doug was the only one who was in any shape to play

Keef, like Iggy, had (maybe they've had to mellow eventually) that Iron Man Constitution which was fascinating especially since if you did anything near what they did yourself at home you would probably die or end up like, say, Roky Erickson. They weren't quite human, at least in their heyday and maybe still, which allows one to enjoy the spectacle whilst avoiding certain thoughts, whereas Bob Pollard's case is depressing to contemplate because it is a picture of exactly what would happen to you, like looking into an unpleasantly illuminated bathroom mirror: This is Your Gut on Beer.

Swimming river flow
Rifle, bullet, arrow & bow
Plaster, paint & tile
Lepus, canine, cat & reptile

"deflect/project"

have been listening to lots of gbv the past two weeks for the first time in quite awhile, p much sticking to the fertile fields of the propellor through earthquake glue zone, nothing new to say except that yes he really was astonishingly plugged into something for a good long while and yes the drinking is just incredibly uncute and man on the prime trilogy of propellor-b1000-AL that peculiar collage-maker's genius for sequencing a record was one of his very strongest assets

also the guitar playing on i am a tree still makes me laugh out loud (i mean that in a good way)-- d gillard is always welcome on my block for that

The experimental collage effect the music and album art had together as complete packages with their early 90s material was so much more thematically interesting than the later period narrow focus on sounding like The Who as much as possible. I do find some of the later period stuff fun though.

gillard is just so good at that ultra crunch cheap trick who thing that his bravura carries me through a lot of the mk II era albums, also the songs are still frequently great on those

I know their early albums are best but I like the later stuff I've picked up too (I'm by no means a completist for obvious reasons...) August by Cake is surprisingly solid.

sticking to the fertile fields of the propellor through earthquake glue zone

i'm honestly not sure where one album title ends and the other begins here

Lol

I really don't like Gillard's guitar playing tbh.

Agree. Dude's playing is particularly lifeless and rote.

yeah but at least he is not a girl
lol

Yeah, there is quite a bit of this subject on this thread too. I saw them like quite a few times including when they first was starting to tour when Pollard was still teaching. Being from Dayton, playing in Bloomington and Indianapolis was one of their main places to regularly gig. The first few times were fun as heck, but the last time I saw them, which was after the old touring band was gone and probably their biggest show in like 1999 was kinda sad. Have not seen them live or listened to any of their newer albums much since.

Why in the name of all that is holy do people like Guided by Voices?

I wonder if Pollard has another gear to shift to; the dude is sixty... is he going to keep being a stooge or is their something more reflective on the horizon?

Even if there is something more reflective coming down the pike what are the chances it actually gets noticed in his endless barrage of releases?

He's done reflective before but, as you say, it was hard to spot among the torrent, too much hard work anyway.

lol matos really Kool aid mans into that thread with some hot takes

"Kool aid mans" is my new favorite verb

Totally! I implore y'all to know what I mean next time I type KAM

I'mma kool aid man into a random bar thread this weekend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8F4UahIVV8

That's wonderful

wrt to new GBV, I've kinda decided it's not worth the effort to keep up. feel like there's a lot of stuff i want to listen to and if I'm in the mood for GBV I'd rather just pull out Propeller or Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, etc...

When they first reunited, I made this playlist taking the first five new albums and grabbing the tracks I thought were good into one playlist. it's not bad i think....I listened to a bit of the new one sounded pretty boring...

https://open.spotify.com/user/matthelgeson/playlist/6pNdtcAVo6SVin1hcF594M

Is the GBV song database website still around ? I remember even by 2000 or so the volume of content was massive.

Www.gbvdb.com

Don't know how up to date it is, but it's got 2600 songs overall now.

my favourite GBV of the new era was a Toby song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BmnM6wwyhU

my favorite GBV of the old era are mostly Toby songs

A sparkled shiny diner is a home for wayward minor

I thought August by Cake was pretty good - certainly an improvement over the one before it. And I guess there's already another new one on the way.

whenever bob settles into uncle zim triplicate mode it will be fierce. wonder who he'd cover

Pollard hasn't really written 2,600 songs - he's started writing 2,600 songs and only actually finished a fraction of 'em.

OTM, so many of them are lacking a middle eight!!!

Funny this came up but I've been trying to listen to some of those Pollard solo albums where Todd Tobias plays all the instruments and Bob just sings (sometimes in tune) over the top of them, Jesus but a lot of that stuff is just godawful.

Circus Devils is definitely the band I've listened to the most records by that I don't like at all.

And I think August by Cake is just OK but the Mark Shue-penned songs are really good!