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CMJ
By Steve Klinge
The marketing hook to
Guided by Voice's "Do The Collapse" is that Ric
Ocasek-he of the sleek Cars-produced, thereby obliterating any chance
that the band will retain the "lo-fi" albatross that
leader Robert Pollard has never embraced as an aesthetic.
Actually, Ocasek's
involvement produces only incremental changes. The
last GBV album, '97's "Mag Earwhig!," fell relatively high on the
fi-scale, anyway.
On
"Collapse", though, the songs sound more "finished"
than ever before. Where past GBV albums each had standout tracks, gems
that leapt out against the fragments and fuzz, "Collapse" is full of
complete, fully realized songs. Sure, Pollard
continues to revisit his favorite
anthemic melodies, but whereas before he didn't always bother writing
an ending, or sometimes a beginning, for his killer choruses, here the
songs not only have the production clarity of the
"arena-rock" style he aims for (I count four permutations of the
"Don't
Fear The Reaper" riff), but they also have the structure to make them
stick.
And Pollard's surreal
non-sequiturs remain; "Surgical Focus," "Optical
Hopscotch," "Strumpet Eye," and "Teenage FBI" live up
to their titles
(and "Hold On Hope," "Wormhole," and "Wrecking
Now" surpass theirs).
Unless you valued GBV for its messy fragmentations,
"Do The Collapse" offers a higher concentration
of what
the band does best than any of its previous albums.