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Tampa Tribune
By Rommie Johnson
Special thanks to Doug King!
Lexo & The Leepers - Ask Them
Nightwalker - In Shop We Build Electric Chairs
Fading Captain Series
Don't be fooled, these are really the fourth and fifth solo discs
from Guided By Voices leader Robert Pollard. Names were changed, we're
guessing, to protect the casual enthusiast from expenditures only a
fanatic could feel good about. "Ask Them," the more listenable of
the the
pair, gives Dayton, Ohio's Tasties (playing the Leapers to Pollard's Lexo)
six stabs at recycling the better bits of old-school GbV, counterfeit 60's
and 70's rock itself. Opener "Time Machines" is a fun blast of
post-punk
with yucky heavy-metal guitar effects and off-key vocals. "Alone,
Stinking and Unafraid" has the second best title (top spot goes to
"Circling Motorhead Mountain"), and a memorable chorus.
A less celebrated side of early GbV was the sort of tossed-off wank you'll find on "Electric Chairs." Billed as a collection of tracks by Bloomington, Ind., combo Nightwalker, it's really Pollard and friends sitting around the basement with a four-track, passing a joint and banging on various instruments. The resulting lo-fi pastiche of ugly guitars, percussive clicks and crashes, and slurred vocals is self-indulgent, but most tracks are mercifully brief. An exception, "Those Little Bastards Will Bite," does nothing for seven minutes before turning into a dirgey Krautwork version of GbV's "Postal Blowfish," as catchy as any one-chord drone you'll ever hear. For potheads and completists.