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Waved Out Review from Salon Entertainment

Robert Pollard

WAVED OUT

Matador

And now, for his next trick, the infamous Guided by Voices frontman will yet again prove his irritatingly scattershot pop genius with a handful of gorgeous art-punk hymns that he tosses off like so many crumbs ... and then dilute their impact with about a dozen half-finished sketches he hardly has the energy to toss off in the first place. There is some proof here that Pollard's matured, though. After 10 years of scribbling inscrutable Cheap Trick tributes and knockoffs, his sense of vocal phrasing has become more studied (read: less drunken), and his songcraft edges ever closer to the gloomy majesty of his declared favorite album, Wire's "154." But Wire's "154" mattered because its clinical precision made its off-kilter hooks more magnetic, more majestic, scarier. All "Waved Out" has is the precision (at least more than usual), and a few good hooks: the distant, lovely melody of "Wrinkled Ghost," a solemn, waltzing prayer for the dead on "People Are Leaving" and a raving prayer to the next generation of indie rockers on "Make Use" -- which is the same generation who'll listen to the distanced, empty ditties that fill up the rest of the record and go back again to Guided by Voices' "Bee Thousand." There they'll find perhaps the greatest fluke of genius in indie-rock history, and happily stay there.