New York Press

By J. R. Taylor

Guided by Voices

Mag Earwhig!

(Matador)

Though it's the one field where diligence and hard work is vital, people love to perpetuate the lie that the work ethic is also contrary to rock 'n' roll. No matter how spotty Guided By Voices has been throughout this decade, Robert Pollard has always deserved credit for running a band like a small business. He invested his own money in a strategy of self-releasing a barrage of albums, and actually saw a payoff when his unconventional songwriting became a subsidy of a corporate entity. With Mag Earwhig!, Pollard finally gains his reward by declaring himself CEO and ditching his few longtime cohorts in favor of a completely new backing band. And since Mag Earwhig! is the first truly great Guided By Voices album, Pollard deserves to be lunching with Michael Eisner and Lee Iacocca.

When Pollard recruited the already great Cobre Verde as his backing band, he also got the dizzying metaphor of "I Am A Tree" thrown into the bargain. But Pollard's own 19 compositions here are the most tunefully sporadic of his concentrated career. The entire album may be a subtle aping of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, but Pollard's beautiful sense of suburban prog rock still leaves all the pretension to small English estates. He's never so impenetrable that he can't make his point in a song snippet, and his melodies are so beautiful and uncommercial that no one would even recognize the name of his two sole contemporaries.