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Dayton Daily News
April 6 2001
Ron Rollins

Guided By Voices
Isolation Drills   
TVT


"A-"

When Guided by Voices really grows up, we are now
starting to find, it will apparently resemble
something very close to a rock group. That isn't a
slam on Dayton's favorite band, the kids who won the
lottery and hit the big time. It's an observation
about the cookie-cutter nature of most rock bands, and
a comment on how GBV has always differed from most of
them. 

Back up a few years--back to ex-schoolteacher and
compulsive hook-writer Bob Pollard's creation of the
band in his garage from the loose aggregation of
friends and family members who understood and reveled
in what he was up to: namely, cathartic, creatively
undisciplined songwriting based on bouncy melody bites
and relentlessly low-tech recording. The irony of
Pollard's story is that he got the attention of the
rock world not in the usual way--by sounding like
everyone else--but by sounding only like himself. 

But now the pressure is on. For its first major-label
album (on TVT Records), 1999's Do the Collapse, the
group teamed with producer Ric Ocasek, whose strict
hand reined the band in for a terrific record, though
one that for the first time sounded little like the
GBV of old. Less erratic, more refined. The songs rang
like a finger along the edge of a crystal wineglass,
but you could almost hear the band itching to smash
the thing. 

Isolation Drills, the second TVT disc, sounds far more
like what we have expected and wanted all along.
Producer Rob Schnapf, who has worked with such
eccentric smoothies as Beck, Elliott Smith and Foo
Fighters, has let GBV be GBV far more than Ocasek did.


Immediately apparent, from the opening crash of the
Mersey-jangle chording and Pollard's weathered
crooning on Fair Touching, is a return to the two
great influences of his musical life: the mad, mod
pinnacles of late-1960s British-Invasion rock and the
spare garage-band punkiness of the best bands of the
late '80s; Pete Townshend meets Paul Westerberg, in
other words. 

The best songs on Isolation Drills--and there are
many; Chasing Heather Crazy and Glad Girls may be the
best anyone will write this year--revisit this old
creative tension and push it to heights the band
hasn't seemed to reach previously. One critic has
already called this something like the greatest
unreleased British Invasion album, but while that's
high praise of a sort, it doesn't quite pay credit to
the swirl of other flavors and good, weird ideas
Pollard brings to even the most familiar-sounding
tunes. 

In between songs, Pollard has dropped a few scratchy
little lo-fi ditties, such as Frostman. They serve as
bridges in the action, to remind old fans and new
alike that yes, GBV did start out in a basement. The
trick works for the most part, but it sometimes comes
off as self-indulgent and a bit calculated--never more
so than on How's My Drinking, apparently written by
Pollard in response to criticism of his drunken antics
at his last Dayton show. 

Still, what we have on Isolation Drills is a work that
in many ways sounds like the album GBV has been
building toward for years--solid, entertaining,
hearty, mature. And yet, for all its strengths, it
gains them by moving the band closer than it has ever
been to potential mainstream success by playing fairly
well within the bounds of the mainstream rules it has
long avoided (and for the second time in a row, no
less). There's nothing wrong with that, really. It's
just that we never thought we'd hear ourselves saying
that about this particular band.