Dayton Daily News - 9/22/00
By Ron Rollins

Guided By Voices
Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft
#6 in the Fading Captain Series

GRADE: A -

We've known all along that he was prolific, but listening to Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft, one gets a mental image of   Robert Pollard as some kind of Inspector Gadget guy, unable to keep dozens of musical outbursts and flashes of brilliance from flying uncontrollably off him, Songs tumble from his pockets, skittering along.

Kerplunk! There's the loose, discordant shamble of a new cut, Born on Seaweed.

Bump! There's the understated drama of a 1989 humdinger called Turbo Boy

Thump! There's the grungy rant of 1992's Mr. Media. Plunk! That's the strangle-cry blues of 1990's Sabotage. It is a great song.

Great, and this is the stuff Pollard hasn't had the inclination to put on one of the dozen or so album's he released as the leader of Guided By Voices over the last 20 years. They are his basement tapes, literally, carefully culled and offered up to our awaiting ears for the first time. It is a massive quantity of music: four discs of 100 songs stretching back to 1974, when a teenage-age Pollard was still noodling with his guitar and a cruddy tape deck, dreaming of becoming a rock star just by following his muse.

The dream worked out pretty much that way, as acolytes know. GBV is a bona fide critics' darling, the crush of an incredibly loyal fan cadre and very possibly the most important indie-rock band in the country. GBV has always been Pollard and his vision, band membership varying year to year, depending on which of his friends happened be nearby when he felt like recording.

Suitcase captures idiosyncratic enthusiasm and gives better insights into the creative workings of Pollard's mind that anything else he's produced. It isn't arranged chronologically, as one would expect, and mixes songs, styles and lineups from all phases of GBV's life span. This is a good thing, producing bizarre, intriguing musical collisions: Pollard recording solo (just voice and guitar on 1992's tortured Pluto The Skate) flows into the bouncy chat-sing of 1989's Let's Go Vike, done with Jim Pollard on guitar, Mitch Mitchell on bass and Kevin Fennel on drums.

Variety is constant. What more impresses over four hours of listening is Pollard's reach and range - surprising even after years of familiarity, He stretches his voice to a painful yowl and later, shows a little-seen sensitive side. He whispers, he growls. We get the effected English accent (the great Brit-Invasion anthem Messenger from '85); we get goofy rodeo billy jamming (1990's Big Trouble); we get CBGB's-style punk (95's Ghost Black Pie); we get haunted vocal distortion (the unhappy Spinning Around from '83). There is so much; it's almost too much. But it is nearly all interesting, and in the current pop/rock market interesting gets you at least a B+. The bravery and chutzpah it takes to gather up the songs that have fallen out of your pockets for several decades and release them all at once knocks you up another notch. Curious newcomers: Start with GBV's 1999 Do the Collapse CD and work backward until reaching your lo-fi tolerance. Everybody else: dig in.