Friday, August 6, 1999

Lordy, we can already hear the carping of the uptown
critics who've been goofily in love all these years
not just with Guided By Voices, but with the idea of
Guided by Voices--you know, how Robert Pollard and his
beer buddies singlehandedly saved indie rock by
retreating into his garage and recording pop-gem
snippets and half-ideas of tunes on fuzzy four-tracks.

It's a rock-mag legend.

Those writers--who did Dayton a favor by taking note
of our favorite local band, but also backhanded us by
acting as if it was weird to find talent in a Midwest
backwater town--will emit the first howls when they
hear Do the Collapse. They'll say the lo-fi heroes
have sold out, that the vultures of commercialism are
roosting on Pollard's songbook.

Fellow backwater dwellers, pay them no mind.

Truth is, this is the GBV record some of us have
waited for, the one that balances the artistic
peculiarities singular to the band with a healthy dose
of accessibility and a shot at mainstream success.
Pollard tapped Ric Ocasek, the former Cars brain, to
produce and moved the band from tiny record label
Matador to less-tiny TVT. At first, Ocasek's influence
sounds superficial: keyboard burbles, some strings.
But that forgets the man's devotion to the perfect
three-minute pop song, and later one senses that he
may well have provided just the right amount of
encouragement Pollard needed to stay on the road he
began traveling on Mag Earwhig!--namely, molding and
shaping those old badly recorded, hard-to-hear riffs
and tidbits into actual songs.

Turns out they're good ones, too. Pollard's writing on
Collapse shows his usual gift for witty,
impressionistic catchphrases, but this time he's done
more than just stitch together non sequitors. Not to
overstate the case, for Pollard is still Pollard, but
these lyrics build upon one another, providing
glimmers of meaning that would once have sounded out
of place on a GBV disc. The music has gusto, dependent
on the tank-tread clank of Doug Gillard's guitars and
Jim MacPherson's sixth-sense drumming--it's
well-rounded, no-frills hard pop that lets Pollard's
smoke-strained voice carry the emotional load.

In other words, things haven't changed all that much;
they've just gotten easier to listen to. The effect,
after tons of hazy GBV records, is that of being able
to walk right up to a painting that before you had to
glimpse from across a football field. The scrappiness
remains; the sloppiness is gone.

And if GBV is easier on the ears, what's the
complaint? After all these years, we'd be stingy to
fault Pollard for wanting to carry his music to a
wider audience, and it's obvious that he and Ocasek
worked hard to apply just the right amount of polish
without damaging the original goods. To my ears, they
succeeded and fell far short of sellout.

The final tune, a brief sonic blast called An
Unmarketed Product, may tell the tale: "An unmarketed
product is shining clear for many years ... Shut out
the fears for many years," Pollard sings, perhaps of
himself. "Suitable and custom tailored / And if you
have any luck / You'll get ahead / Before you're dead
... " This might be the time when that happens.