Believe it or not, Guided By Voices is back. Space Gun, debatably album 26, packs 15 songs into 39 minutes of evocative, abstract lyrics and vigorous, buzzing power pop, borne along as always on Robert Pollard’s resonant rasp. If that doesn’t sound like a radical departure from the group’s oeuvre, well, it isn’t. However, if you tuned out—maybe a little over-sated—from the Dayton, Ohio, band in the late 1990s, Space Gun is a protein-rich re-entry point from which to begin your backtrack through the post-millennium catalog, and a bracing signal that this enduring group is just as potent in its latest iteration.
Guided By Voices is a stylistic child of the guitar rock diaspora, and, fittingly, Space Gun’s instrumentation leans straightforward. Songs like “See My Field,” “Flight Advantage” and “King Flute” exemplify the album’s core with triumphant blends of sweeping rhythm guitar, ascending lead riffs and rolling rhythm sections. Elsewhere, “Colonel Paper,” “Grey Spat Matters” and “Daily Get Ups” blare with torrents of post-punk intensity, while the sing-a-long-worthy “Blink Blank” swaggers on a clean, sneering guitar and subtly throbbing bassline. Credit for this deft exercise in a half-century of influences goes to the mix of familiar (guitarist Doug Gillard, drummer Kevin March) and fresh (Bobby Bare Jr. on guitar, Mark Shue on bass) personnel, who provide a professional, propulsive heft to Pollard’s affecting, fantastical lyrics.
To close read Pollard’s opaque narratives is almost certainly to miss out on a good chunk of the fun. Better to sit back and let the rousing weirdness wash over you, warm beer in hand. Still, when dealing with a writer who owns up to being “lost in a make believe city” and who invites the listener to be a spectator to his “cartoon” in the same song, it’s hard not to root around. Take this scene from “Colonel Paper”: “Are you, like, extra crispy, when you wake up? / And bleed extract of coffee bean / into a cup” or this, from “Blink Blank”: “Lighthouse black / coffee can blue / I lost an umbrella / searching for you, in a shit storm.” It’s easy to get stuck on each bit of imagery before even considering the wider tableau and vice versa. Pollard has made his decades-long career by seamlessly switching out well-worn pop platitudes for his own passionate, free-associative metaphors without losing a shred of emotional intensity. Space Gun shows that his evolution from four-track hero to prolific studio user has hardly blunted this unapologetically poetic style.
With its powerfully cohesive sonic topography and motley cast of rat smashers, ill-fated squires and cigarette eaters, Space Gun is a robust marriage between the band’s rugged past and more polished present. Further, it’s a reminder that Pollard’s best character is himself. Raucous, tequila-swilling live shows and myriad monikers aside, its the persistently idiosyncratic curiosity thjat has made his music so compelling for so long. Over bright, jangling acoustic guitar and a jaunty rhythm, track 11, “I Love Kangaroos,” provides a neat summary: “…exactly where I’m going with this nobody cares / nobody knows.”