Teenage Guitar

Teenage Guitar

More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush

GBV Inc

Robert Pollard, head lunatic of the Guided By Voices’ asylum, has a surfeit of original thoughts. (Most people are lucky to have even one, ever.) That this even needs to be expressed is evidence enough for its “truth,” as only obvious or obviously untrue things can ever hope to be true. Or to approach the truth. Something Pollard does with uncanny regularity, and which is further on display on every track on the gloriously unkempt, roiling-with-ideas More Lies from the Gooseberry Bush, the second record Pollard has released under the nom-de-rock Teenage Guitar. Here’s a song title: “Matthew’s Ticker and Shaft a. Come to Breakfast b. The Girls Arrive c. Division of Swans d. When Death Has a Nice Ring.” It starts with distorted guitar over a primitive snare-and-bass-drum beat (all instruments on all songs played by Pollard), shifts into an out-of-tune piano clumping along a simple seven-chord progression, lurches into a wall of distorted guitar as two tracks of Pollard wail, wide-panned in each speaker, before finally resolving in a pretty harpsichord figure (or some synthesized version thereof) inelegantly tripping over itself before trailing off into the next track: “The Instant American,” which presents multi-tracked Pollard vocals chanting over a background of what sounds like a bunch of people at a party drinking. These are not the two strangest tracks on the fourteen-song album, which clocks in at just over thirty minutes. If there are times when Pollard’s musical ambition seems to overwhelm his ability to present his ideas coherently, that’s...

Teenage Guitar

Force Fields At Home

GBV Inc

For the most discerning aficionados of Robert Pollard and Guided By Voices, Teenage Guitar offers experiments in spontaneity and lo-fi witchiness and wizardry, exploring multiple moods and styles. This is pure high-potency solo Pollard (vocals, guitars, piano) with occasional assistance from Greg Demos (drums) and Joe Patterson (bass). Brewed in the home laboratory using a historic mid-90s Tascam 488 cassette recorder, without professional engineers or adult supervision, Force Fields at Home recalls the sound and spirit of mid-’90s GBV EPs like Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer. Only the lyrics were composed ahead—the music flowed spontaneously while the tape ran. Don’t blink, these will disappear quickly.