While Guided by Voices’s first-wave indie-rock peers have mostly settled into a one-album-every-few-years groove, the band has somehow released a whopping 15 albums since reuniting (again) in 2016. While a certain level of inconsistency is, to some extent, part of their charm, since the 2000s Guided by Voices have released a steady stream of satisfying albums shot through with flashes of the power-pop that made them famous.
On their latest collection of spiky art punk, La La Land, the group again serves up a variety of memorable hooks and abstract, knife-to-the-heart lyrics. The album opens with, on “Another Day to Heal,” the familiar sound of driving guitars and oozing vocal harmonies. The song packs three choruses and some unglamorous guitar leads into its brief runtime, a stark contrast to the elaborate and lengthy—by Guided by Voices’s standards, anyway—compositions of last year’s Tremblers and Goggles by Rank. Like that album, though, the production glistens with comparatively luxurious high fidelity—a far cry from the band’s tape hiss-laden early releases.
The sound of those shambolic salad days still shines through when the group settles into a melodious jam like they do on “Released Into Dementia.” Backed by distorted guitars, and synthesizers during the bridge, Robert Pollard ruminates on fading memories: “I can see you in the night, I can know you in the light, and I can release you.” Elsewhere, the tinny guitars and vocal effects of “Wild Kingdom” wouldn’t have felt out of place on 1992’s Propeller, while its absurdist lyrics—“No uncertain terms for germs/Snipers in diapers/Not to vaccinate, but to baptize a new creation”—recall the hooky, Dada-esque “Finger Gang.”
Pollard’s exceedingly sharp songwriting only stumbles on the six-minute “Slowly on the Wheel.” The silly cabaret verses bog down an otherwise compelling experiment with more unusual song structures. But the band quickly bounces back with “Cousin Jackie,” a burly guitar-pop number whose tight verses flow into a breezy chorus that then segues into an opaque outro.
Pollard and company wind down the album with three songs that easily rank among their best, the melancholic “Caution Song” standing out especially. “Who are these people anyway?/Who wants a sad song these days?” asks Pollard, perhaps questioning his place in the algorithm-driven musical landscape of the 2020s. Meanwhile, the closing track, “Pockets,” is a nervy stomper that overlays its back-to-basics groove with fuzzed-out solos and tender vocal harmonies before culminating in a beautiful, Sonic Youth-esque guitar coda.
La La Land exemplifies why Guided by Voices has managed to maintain their decades-spanning cult following. Not only does the band’s output remain as inexhaustible and freewheeling as ever, the album stands as some of their best late-career work.
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