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From Philadelphia Weekly September 2000
By Jonathan Valania

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

3 1/2 stars

Forty-two tracks into this four-disc collection of Guided By Voices odds
and sods there is a song title that perfectly describes the wizardly pop
alchemy of Robert Pollard: "Shit Midas". Employing the same Buckeye
ingenuity that keeps the Goodyear blimp afloat, Pollard can polish a turd
with Budweiser until it shines with 24-carat radiance, transmuting a
tossed-off, six-pack idea into a classic rock artifact or at the very least
a beguiling curio. As captain of the drunken boat that is Guided By Voices,
Pollard has built a cottage industry by churning out cheap, miniature
melodic masterpieces with all the fidelity of a ham radio broadcast. He's
cornered the market on lo-fi charm, and he does it with volume. Quantity
that is, not loudness. The eternal question on the question on the lips of
record store clerks and zine scribblers ever since GBV became an indie
phenomenon upon the release of their 1994 masterwork Bee Thousand is what,
pray tell, is the source of this seemingly bottomless fount of song? For
years Pollard has dropped sly hints about a suitcase buried deep in the
dusty recesses of some Dayton basement that contained recordings of some
5,000 songs dating back to his pre-teen beginnings as a rock composer. As
legend has it, he would, under a full moon and half-a-load on, open this
satchel and a brilliant ray of inspirational light would beam out, or at
the very least he would find an old song or two to cannibalize. As the
years passed, the mystique of the suitcase grew to mythical proportions,
until it became the Rosebud in indie rock's attic, the Rosetta Stone that
can decode the mysteries of the Perfect Pop Moment. The release of
Suitcase: Trashed Aircraft and Failed Experiments is tantamount to that
scene at the end of "Citizen Kane" where the camera zooms in on the image
of the sled being tossed onto the fire, as the flames slowly burn off the
letters R-O-S-E-B-U-D and the elusive secret of the film is revealed as it
is destroyed. This four disc collection has the same effect on Pollard's
song-stuffed Samsonite, which I have long speculated may well contain the
one magical tune that could save rock n' roll. That song isn't here. There
is no long lost Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes to be pieced together out of
these 100 tracks, though there are plenty of hummable outtakes from that
golden era. In many ways, Suitcase is the long-missing bookend to 1995's
Box, which collected the four impossible-to-find albums that pre-dated the
release of Vampire On Titus, revealing that in fact, GBV's best work was
still by and large ahead of them. Suitcase is not for tourists. GBV
beginners are well advised to begin with Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes and
work forward. Suitcase is for the superfans that still can't get enough
G-B-fuckin'-V after 23 albums and E.P.s and more doomed singles than you'll
find on stumbling down Delaware Avenue on penny drink night. To track the
labyrinthine lineage of these songs would take a slide rule and a flowchart
stretching from my house to yours. But suffice it to say that they range in
date and origin from 1974's "Little Jimmy The Giant", 16-year-old Bobby
Pollard's fairytale ode to his kid brother, and 1979's "Mr. Mc Caslin Will
Sell No More Flowers", a Capraesque tribute to some Dayton florist that
sounds like it was recorded in the Middle Ages, all the way up to "Raphael"
and "Born On Seaweed", which were put to tape earlier this year. The bulk
of the material here was written and recorded over the last decade of
Pollard's 30-year rockathon, stemming from three primary sources: two
aborted albums, 1989's "Learning To Hunt" (represented here with the
Midwestern McCartney-ism of "Blue Gil") and 1992's "Back To Saturn X";
demos from 1995's shelved concept album The Power of Suck, a doomed
collaboration between Pollard, Kim Deal and then-bass player/ex-Spin scribe
Jim Greer; and demos and song sketches from Bee Thousand (there's an
embryonic "Buzzards And Dreadful Crows" from 1989) up to last year's Do The
Collapse. Overall, there is enough glorious basement-pop manna – "Ha-Ha
Man", "Bughouse", "Messenger" to name just three – mixed in with all these
abandoned ideas, discarded refrains and beer-soaked brainfarts to justify
the investment for GBV lifers. If you've read this far, that probably means
you, or somebody you know and love. Philadelphia has smiled on Guided By
Voices since the band broke from the twilight obscurity of Dayton five
years ago, packing the Khyber time and again to watch Pollard baptize
himself with Budweiser and belch out the greatest songs never heard -- and
for one beery moment everything still seemed possible. If your passion for
GBV has slowly diminished as the production values of each ensuing album
has steadily evolved from field recording fuzzy to radio-friendly, this is
a good chance to get back to where you once belonged. Given the
dustbunny-on-the-needle fidelity of the these recordings, Suitcase will
remind you of why you first fell in love with the myth of beer-pounding,
ex-teacher old dudes building four-track masterpieces in the basements of
the Midwest.