In contrast to the widespread tragedy, outrage, and dread of 2020, Guided by Voices’s Mirrored Aztec offers a musical experience where dark emotions become sublimated through bright, rousing, old-school power pop. It’s an ethos reflected in the album’s cover art, which—in the vein of Savage Resurrection or the 13th Floor Elevators—features a woman sprouting a nymph-populated garden of psychedelic, DayGlo plants and flowers.
Mirrored Aztec is also something of a back-to-basics turn for the band’s current lineup. After two consecutive outings heavy on prog-rock structures and odd time signatures, the album follows a simpler template. Indeed, it initially seems to raise the possibility that lead singer and songwriter Robert Pollard may have drawn from the same well once too often. Opening track “I Think I Had It. I Think I Have It” features the kind of stabbing downstroke guitar work that’s defined this lineup’s most anthemic creations, including “Just to Show You,” “Space Gun,” “You Own the Night,” and “Cohesive Scoops.” And yet the track is too distinctive—and too damn good—to dismiss as self-derivative or parodic, coasting on a simple pattern of chords that escalates in intensity from verse to chorus and over which Pollard fashions a catchy vocal melody imparting an oblique battle cry that’s equal parts regret and no-looking-back affirmation: “Vision corrected/Oh, what I neglected back then.” Pollard’s slightly strained vocals on the high notes add a touch of endearing fallibility.
On Guided by Voices’s last few albums, Pollard brought to hi-fi life songs that until now have only existed as demos on the four Suitcase box sets, and Mirrored Aztec happily follows recent tradition. Overshadowed on the first Suitcase by the likes of “Pink Drink,” “Supermarket the Moon,” and “I’m Cold,” “Bunco”—a song that’s been sitting in Pollard’s workshop for at least two decades—employs unconventional chord changes to move from minor-key verses to major-key choruses. “Bunco” initially sounds awkward, but the strange tonal shifts underline eerie, poetic lyrics that constantly alternate between confinement and freedom: “Limited dimensions are following you/Ours is a room with a view under the stars.”
Pollard has used the new Guided by Voices—comprising himself, lead guitarist Doug Gillard, rhythm guitarist Bobby Bare Jr., bassist Mark Shue, and drummer Kevin March—to execute more experimental ideas, a tendency that peaked with last year’s Sweating the Plague. Here the two out-of-leftfield numbers are “Please Don’t Be Honest” and “Math Rock.” The former number, boasting a title antithetical to the band’s 2016 album Please Be Honest, is propelled by a giddy riff and palm-muted guitar work. Fun enough, but then a non-sequitur bridge composed of lush acoustic guitar and synths launches the song into the unforeseen sublime.
“Math Rock,” meanwhile, is not in the style of math rock. Though Gillard’s lead is jerky (or “angular,” as critics often like to point out) and March’s drumming is virtuosically busy, Pollard keeps the song light and playful rather than cold and technical. And the main riff is buoyed by what sounds like a toy piano, while later a delicious, concluding crescendo features a children’s choir shouting “Math Rock!” in answer to Pollard’s repeated exclamation, “Children of the nation/Join in the celebration!”
Pollard seems especially inspired by women whose names begin with “J”—as evidenced by GbV songs titles like “June Salutes You!,” “Jane of the Waking Universe,” and “The Best of Jill Hives”—and “Thank You Jane” stands out here for an exceedingly bouncy guitar line and sunny vocal melody, redolent of the Hollies and the Zombies. It also evokes nostalgia of another sort: Along with “The Birthday Democrats” from 2017’s How Do You Spell Heaven and “I Love Kangaroos” from 2018’s Space Gun, “Thank You Jane” might be one of the few latter-day GbV tracks to recall Pollard’s attempt in the late ’90s and early aughts to recharge British Invasion-era pop with indie-rock energy. The song is so ebullient in appreciating the sheer miracle of existence (“Thank You Jane for stepping up to the plate to take your swing”) as to rival “Chasing Heather Crazy” and “Girls of Wild Strawberries” in pure pop perfection.
Not all of Mirrored Aztec is as great as “Thank You Jane” or any of the previously mentioned highlights. “Transfusion” and its chorus of “Too much confusion/Need a transfusion” is perhaps the album’s least interesting entry, rivaled only by the midtempo “Screaming the Night Away,” a track that feels especially sleepy after following the stomping “Haircut Sphinx.” Luckily, “Party Rages On” ends the album with gusto, though also by realistically promising that the continuance of all-out fun can only be earned by overcoming various pratfalls and tragedies (“Bill was face down,” “The speaker was blown out,” “The general was so dead”). It’s a fitting note of perseverance on which to end another triumphant album for Pollard and company, the only band that may very well outlive us all.
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