Stereo Review/Sound
May 2001
Parke Puterbaugh

Guided By Voices
Isolation Drills
TVT Records


Music: ****
Sound: ***
In another time and place--say the mid-late Sixties or early-mid 
Eighties--songs like these would have stood a far greater chance of hooking 
up Guided by Voices with a mass audience instead of an enlightened sliver. 
The prolific GBV cram an entire GNP's worth of tunes onto their albums, and 
having lately moved beyond the dubious "charm" of low-fi to more cleanly 
recorded presentations--hey, even Michael Stipe (of R.E.M.) stopped mumbling 
after a while--they are possibly the best band you've never heard. Without 
question frontman Robert Pollard is one of the rock's greatest singers. 
Imagine Stipe's burry diction and Roger Daltry's earthy potency spiced with 
Byrdsy harmonic seasoning.

Isolation Drills is Pollard's most personal and touching set of tunes. 
Shrugging off the indie-minded cloak of purposeful obscurity, he addresses 
what may have become a personal liability in the somber "How's My Drinking?" 
(not good, apparently) and scarifying "Sister I Need Wine" (why? "for color 
in my skin and darkness for my eyes that I can see the light burn through"). 
There are songs of madness ("Leave your things in the street and run wild," 
he urges in "Run Wild") and simmering passion ("Unspirited," a mesmerizing 
collage of overlapping vocals, melancholy guitar jangle and symphonic 
Mellotron gusts). "Chasing Heather Crazy," a winsome pop gem if ever there 
was one, sounds like a great lost Gene Clark-era Byrds nugget. The 16 songs 
on Isolation Drills are as gorgeous as autumn sunsets. Austere in temperament 
and melodic by compulsion, they're also vaguely heroic in the way they 
implicitly salute the notion that music can uplift and transform even in 
one's darker hours.