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Mag Earwhig! Dayton Daily News
(3 stars out of 4)
A new lineup? Clean sound? Liner notes with lyrics? Four-minute songs? What the heck is up with Guided By Voices? Nothing radical, as it turns out Mag Earwhig! is the GBV we're used to, but with some tinkering to make the machine move a bit more smoothly. The question that begs from Dayton's favorite lo-fi basement band would be: is that a good thing? Rumors of breakups and personnel changes started bubbling a year ago, with the gbv army trying to divine the plans of band leader/chief brain Bob Pollard from clues on the internet and buried in cd cover art.
Most of the band - Tobin Sprout, Jim Pollard and Mitch Mitchell - went solo and Pollard hooked up with Cleveland's Cobra Verde to record 15 songs before returning to Dayton to track seven more with his former bandmates. The results would seem uneven on anybody else's record. There's the eerie garage-nightmare brevity of "Can't Hear The Revolution"; the more traditional, lengthy pop structure of "Portable Men's Society"; the strange whiff, of, acoustic smoke provided by the title tune. Pollard's amiably twisted sense of the bizarre, holds everything together - but then, what would you expect?
-Ron Rollins, Dayton Daily News
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brian.mikesell@gbv.com