Since making their second comeback in 2017, Guided By Voices have continued to record at a vicious lick while maintaining standards of quality control that seem frankly unreal. La La Land is their 14th album since the band’s return, and they’re all good – sometimes great. Perhaps Robert Pollard learnt from the previous comeback between 2010 and 2014, a “classic lineup” reunion that never really delivered on the goodwill. When that fell apart, it seemed like the end of the road. In 2016, Pollard brought out a Guided By Voices album called Please Be Honest, which featured him playing every instrument. That didn’t really work either. So Pollard, who is nothing if not persistent, tried again, this time recruiting a band that included old hands Doug Gillard and Kevin March on guitar and drums respectively, with accomplished newbies Mark Shue on bass and Bobby Bare Jr on second guitar. This time, it gelled. And how.
The new lineup are everything that people love about GBV – eclectic, quirky, provocative, melodic, clever, unexpected – but with greater depth and texture and a more pronounced sense of mischief. Their productivity is unparalleled, beginning with 2017’s August By Cake, an exuberant double. Of their 14 releases, two are doubles and another, 2019’s Warp And Woof, had 24 tracks, nearly all of which came in at around 90 seconds or less. While 2017’s sparkling How Do You Spell Heaven and 2019’s heavy-rocking Zeppelin Over China are probably the best, they are all worth your time. Sure, there’s no “Motor Away” or “Game Of Pricks” from the glory days but every album has a mood and two or three special moments: there’s the skronky title track from 2018’s Space Gun, the ace ’90s throwback “My Wrestling Days Are Over” from 2019’s Sweating The Plague, the power pop marvel “My (Limited) Engagement” from 2021’s It’s Not Them… or the epic “Who Wants To Go Hunting?” from last year’s superb Tremblers And Goggles By Rank.
La La Land picks up where that album – their second of 2022 – left off. That means “longer songs… more adventurous structures”, as Pollard tells Uncut. It’s exemplified by the six-minute centrepiece “Slowly On The Wheel”. Pollard manages to pack plenty of twists into even a 90-second song, so six minutes of GBV brings mondo hyperactivity, with the song starting from a minimalist single-chord solo and ending in a blaze of stadium rock thunder. In between comes jangle, heavy metal and eastern chord progressions. It’s followed by the equally fluid “Cousin Jackie”, which sounds like Zeppelin doing doo wop, has the album’s most delirious vocal and boasts a delightful portfolio of drumming from March, who like the rest of the band has to demonstrate consistency within a versatile framework.
Both these tracks, like the best bits of Tremblers…, sound like The Who’s wilder psych-pop symphonies – but if you don’t like that, hang around a minute or three and GBV will have something else to offer. Opener “Another Day To Heal” (the only sub-two-minute song) and “Face Eraser” bring a jerky punk-like energy, while “Ballroom Etiquette” is all about the R.E.M. jangle – plus a lyric that nonchalantly drops the word “fastidious” into a catchy waltz (“I just like the sound of the word,” admits Pollard). “Released Into Dementia” has some of The Flaming Lips’s lysergic drawl, while “Instinct Dwelling” has an intro that sounds very much like the start of Queen’s “Flash’s Theme” before developing into a similarly ominous march. Later, the genteel thrash of “Wild Kingdom” gives way to ballad “Caution Song”, one of the few songs where you can almost anticipate what is going to come next. “Who wants a sad song these days?” asks Pollard on a lyric that otherwise comes across like Dada Morrissey.
Pollard’s lyrics are often abstruse but with memorable lines and a perverse rhythmic charm like the opening to “Instinct Dweller” with its “crypto woman” and “thermometer child”. Pollard’s love of wordplay concludes with “Pockets”, which explores all the different types of pocket, from pool tables to pockets of resistance to places “to cram a jammed fingered glove”. It’s a wonderful example of Pollard’s ability to write a song about almost anything, taking a melody or concept and running with it, and then doing it again, and again, and again, over and over, with spirit-raising results. The one after this will be called Welshpool Frillies, by the way.