By Allesandro Rotondi
Guided By Voices sound like they were recorded in an ethereal garage. Through the barriers of muddy sound production and a demo mixtape atmosphere, Bee Thousand’s songs and melodies transcend far beyond any mere recording technicalities. For fans of the band, you already know this is part of their signature sound, and a huge factor in their magic.
Songs like “Demons Are Real” and “Awful Bliss” seem like mere sketches, but have a complexity and life to them that makes them feel complete and part of a larger picture. This album in itself, is a larger picture. Some songs bleed into each other, or abruptly clash together, while others are sewn together like a patterned quilt, albeit a sometimes unmatching, colourful, and haphazard one. Pollard perhaps describes their sound best, rooting their influences in the “four P’s of rock”: pop, punk rock, progressive rock, and psychedelia.
In total, the album makes up a remarkable thirty-six minutes, with twenty tracks. To put that into perspective, Drake’s Views released in 2016 was also twenty tracks, and ran at eighty-one looong minutes. Guided By Voices did it the right way: though they had a ton of little ditties that made up the album, they were never dragged out and never oversaturated the bigger picture.
In retrospective, Pollard and Co were crafting a conceptual lo-fi masterpiece that winter and spring of 1994. Many music lovers alike will agree that Bee Thousand was the peak of Guided By Voices’ late rise to fame. Even twenty five years later, this album defines what it means to be “indie.” In a modern music world where it’s easy to forget that indie means independent, Guided By Voices was exactly that. Robert Pollard did not need a big record company, a fancy studio, or a nationwide touring contract to be a respected artist. It was a success story that every musician dreams of—after you fear you have failed, the world suddenly wakes up adoring your music.
Notes on Notes 