The early line on the Guided By Voices reunion album Let’s Go Eat At The Factory is that while it’s nowhere near as good as the GBV classics Alien Lanes or Bee Thousand, it’s leagues better than the dozens of solo albums and side projects that frontman Robert Pollard has released in the seven years since the last proper Guided By Voices album. This, I say with all due respect to all concerned, is horseshit. Let’s Go Eat At The Factory does have the same familiar “live from the basement” quality as the vintage Guided By Voices records, I’ll admit—but if I were to make a list of the best albums that Pollard has been made since 2004, I’m not sure Let’s Go Eat At The Factory would crack the top five.
This isn’t meant to slag the new record, which I like overall; nor am I trying to argue that Pollard has been pumping out neglected masterpieces from 2005 on. I’m only suggesting that Let’s Go Eat The Factory is really just business as usual for Pollard: It’s a spotty album with a few great tracks, a lot of filler, and plenty of songs that sound like they could’ve been something if he’d subjected them to another draft or two. About all that distinguishes Factory from the five albums Pollard released last year is that the songs are a little more fragmented and sloppy, and Tobin Sprout contributes. Other than that, I’m doing with it what I do with all my Robert Pollard albums: using it as fodder for the ever-burgeoning “Best of Pollard” playlist I’ve been making ever since Guided By Voices split the first time. I expect to do the same with the follow-up GBV album reportedly due later this year, and with whatever else Pollard chooses to put out in 2012, and beyond.
I also don’t mean to knock my fellow critics for seemingly only caring about Pollard’s music when he releases it under the Guided By Voices name. With hundreds of new albums competing for attention each year, Pollard has all but demanded that we ignore him, simply by releasing something new every few months, under a variety of names, and with different collaborators. And it doesn’t help that, as noted, most of Pollard’s albums are loaded up with undistinguished guitar-rock slop, built around a half-decent riff and maybe one good line, all hammered into listenable shape by Pollard’s longtime musical partner Todd Tobias. Our own Steve Hyden got so fed up Pollard’s prolific-but-uneven work habits back in 2007 that he wrote an anguished article about how disappointed and burned he felt, as a longtime fan. And believe me, I can sympathize.
But maybe it’s because I’m not all that devoted to Pollard or Guided By Voices that I haven’t minded the recent arc of his career so much. From my perspective—and from the perspective of most critics at the time, as I recall—Pollard’s work was just as hit-or-miss toward the end of his first Guided By Voices run as it is now. By the early ’00s, Pollard was trotting out new GBV lineups with just about each new record, though the music remained fundamentally the same: bruised power-pop with Dadaist lyrics, contained within songs that more often and not came off as improvised and unfinished. If I’m being completely honest, post-Under The Bushes Under The Stars, I can’t think of any Guided By Voices album from which I need to hear more than four or five songs. Nothing much has changed during Pollard’s time in the pop wilderness, except that with more albums coming out every year, his unwavering winning percentage is producing a greater overall number of keepers.
This is a problem mainly for those who remain stubbornly devoted to “the album” as the one true expression of a musician’s art. I am not in the camp. I think some musicians are album artists, some are singles artists, and some are rare birds—like Pollard—who use the recording studio as a journal, in which they dash off their fleeting thoughts, rarely going back to revise or refine. Trying to gauge the quality of that kind of output in terms of its totality is the wrong approach. It may not be conventional—or desirable—but Pollard is asking us to do the culling that most recording artists handle themselves.
And so I’ve done just that. Below, I’ve listed 16 fantastic songs that Pollard has recorded and released between 2005 and 2011, between the last Guided By Voices album and the new one. (I’ve also assembled these songs into a Spotify playlist.) This isn’t a comprehensive anthology. I’ve missed one or two Pollard albums over the years, and there are some that I’ve heard but just don’t care for—or that lack one good, representative song. I also confess that I have a bias toward Pollard’s cleaner-sounding power-pop and pretty ballads, where other fans prefer him on the boozy and careening side. Still, if you treat these 16 songs as one LP—and even better, as two eight-song sides—then I think this makeshift Pollard compilation makes a fair case that he hasn’t just been dicking around and wasting his talent all through the late ’00s.
For those who absolutely must hear an entire album from Pollard’s non-Guided By Voices years, I can point you 2006’s From A Compound Eye (his first proper “solo album”), or last year’s surprisingly tight Mars Classroom album New Theory Of Everything. Or, if you’d rather hear Pollard curate his own work, you can head over to his website, where you can buy anthologies of what Pollard sees as the best of his recent work.
Or you could just dive in and make your own. A decade or so ago, it would’ve been prohibitively expensive—and annoying—to have to buy four or five albums a year by the same artist just to get the 10 very good songs he or she actually recorded. These days it’s fairly easy to kick the tires and test-drive a song before buying. Plus, Pollard’s songs are fairly easy to assess via a short sample, since he tends to be a classicist in terms of rock song structure. If a track isn’t going anywhere by the chorus, it’s most likely DOA.
The point here is that at this stage of Pollard’s career, it’d be foolish to expect some magic combination of sidemen, or a familiar name on the sleeve, to serve as a flag that one album is any more worthy of attention than another. That’s true of some musicians, but not Pollard. Each album he releases is part of the headlong, always-another-tune-in-the-chamber, creative rampage that he’s been on since the ’80s.