Description
Still sealed double cd in digipack
The history of Guided By Voices has made clear the band is really Robert Pollard and whoever else he decides is part of the line-up at any given moment, so what is it that truly separates Guided By Voices from Pollard’s many solo projects and side vehicles? Pollard has unwittingly given us the definitive answer to this question with Teenage Guitar, in which Pollard not only writes and sings the songs, as usual, but plays all the instruments himself. On the second Teenage Guitar album, 2014’s More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush, Pollard reveals he has a band to do the work he can’t and/or shouldn’t do himself — namely playing guitar, bass, keyboards, or percussion instruments. If you miss the chaotic lo-fi attack of Guided By Voices earliest work, you might find things to like in More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush, but most of the time, this sounds like a set of rough demos, with two important differences — one, on an actual demo, Pollard would be less likely to decide he needed to play drums, and two, only Pollard’s bandmates would be expected to listen to his demos. In terms of songcraft, More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush is on a par with the average non-Guided By Voices Pollard effort, though this leans to the more elemental end of Pollard’s musical spectrum. But the performances make it clear poor Bob lacks the technical expertise of the average kid in a garage band, and while Guided By Voices was never about chops, there’s a difference between inspired ineptitude and, well, ineptitude. Simply put, Robert Pollard may be a great songwriter and a wildly entertaining frontman, but there are compelling reasons why he had a band of for-real musicians rather than working as a solo act, and More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush is a worse-case-scenario example of the consequences of following the latter path. Only the most obsessive Pollard completists need to pick this up.
Track list:
1. Go Around (The Apartment Dwellers)
2. Spliced At Acme Fair
3. A Guaranteed Ratio
4. Good Mary’s House
5. Skin Ride
6. Full Glass Gone
7. All You Fought For
8. Gear Op
9. No Escape
10. Matthew’s Ticker And Shaft A. Come To Breakfast B. The Girls Arrive C. Division Of Swans D. When Death Has A Nice Ring
11. The Instant American
12. Normalized
13. New Light
14. Birthplace Of The Electric Starter
15. A Year That Could Have Been Worse
16. Court Of Lions
17. Come See The Supermoon
18. Current Pressings, Colors And Styles
19. Still Downstairs
20. 8 Bars Of Meaningless Mathilda
21. Harvest Whale
22. Strangers For A Better Society
23. It Takes A Great Promise
24. It Doesn’t Mean I’m Underground
25. Baby Apple
26. Peter Pan Can
27. Alice And Eddie (Fabulous Child Actors)
28. Alfred Never
29. Gymnasium Politics
30. Atlantic Cod
31. Suburban Cycle Saccharine
32. Post Card To Pinky
33. Let Me