“Have you heard Guided By Voices? They’re a band. I have, I’ve heard everything they’ve ever done. They’re good. I’m a bit of a fan now,” is the flustered beginning of a massive nerd-pandering monologue provided by The IT Crowd’s Katherine Parkinson. I agree with one of her statements about the band: it is good. However, there is no way anyone will ever hear everything the band has ever done.
Formed in 1983 in Ohio, the band has released almost as many albums as years it has been around. Robert Pollard is the band’s ringleader and he has impressively also released more than a dozen solo records in that same space of time. Other than Pollard, the band had mostly seen a revolving door of musicians but in 2012 reunited the classic line-up of Pollard, Tobin Sprout, Greg Demos, Mitch Mitchell, and Kevin Fennell. The albums they released that year, Let’s Go Eat the Factory, Class Clown Spots a UFO, and The Bears for Lunch, are all solid releases from a band that’s been around for more than two decades. They each had their share of the typical GBV sound – a mix of the surreal in their lyrics with lo-fi sensibilities, but none of them really rivaled the affection I’ve had for older releases like Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes.
The band gave us a little breathing room between November’s release (The Bears for Lunch) and has now given us English Little League, an album that does rival the affection of their older releases. It’s got everything that makes a good Guided By Voices song: there are catchy choruses, surreal lyrics, and all the lo-fi eccentricities the band loves to employ. I say lo-fi with hesitance since it is the same case with their other recent releases. English Little League still sounds a lot cleaner than say, their first seven or eight records. Choosing slicker production has always been a problem for their obsessive fans (myself included), you only have to look at the mild to cool reception of 1999’s Do the Collapse to see this.
English Little League sounds like a children’s album, as many Guided By Voices albums do. There are always mentions of boys and girls, whether in a song or in lyrics (“Gold Star For Robot Boy” and “Glad Girls” come to mind), but with English Little League they are front and center just in the album title. There is even an image of a running little boy on the cover. If that doesn’t convince you that this is an album about children, for children, then let me tell you that the little boy I nanny (you think this pays the bills) really, really dug this album every time I played it.
Single “Island (She Talks In Rainbows)” was definitely a big hit with both of us. There is something very 70s about the tune and I’m not just talking about the rainbow reference, the harmonies in the song just feel like a song you’ve grown up hearing for years. It is also a perfect example of why English Little League has now gone up there with my older favorite releases by GBV, lyrically “wrapping my bones around your mind” is one of the weirdest and prettiest things I’ve ever heard, as is the song in general. It also manages to clock in at a few seconds over two minutes, displaying the art of perfecting a song in as little time as possible which few bands other than GBV have managed to do.
“Send to Celeste (And the Cosmic Athletes)” has the little league hanging out in space. It also sounds like a song that’s going to become one of those drunk-singalong songs at their eventual tour stops, but it also sounds like one of those songs that artists write to their children to remind them to never give up. Coincidentally enough, the following track “Quiet Game” sounds like another song to a child, but a little less inspirational and a little more shut up. The backing beat supplied to the fuzzy guitar solo is the formula that has made many a great GBV song. “The Sudden Death of Epstein’s Ways” has a very subtle piano intro that gives way to the solemnly sweet repetition of “Jesus,” which makes sense considering the song is about a death that may have happened ahead of it’s time.
English Little League has few faults in between songs. Guided By Voices have a way of keeping the sound so similar to itself that the dissimilarities range from seeming distasteful or just minor transitions. Regardless, it is an album worthy of their reputation. For strangers to the cultish band, start with this one and move backwards– you will not have wasted your time.
Review by Alex Martinez
