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Esp Ohio

Lithuanian Bombshells

GBV Inc

Robert Pollard has created another fantastic side project (that doesn't feel like a side project) called ESP Ohio. He has reunited with Guided by Voices guitarist/Lifeguards collaborator Doug Gillard. Travis Harrison (drummer / Lifeguards producer) and Mark Shue (current GBV bassist) provide the powerful rhythm section.   Each single contains two non-LP b-sides

Esp Ohio

Royal Cyclopean

GBV Inc

Robert Pollard has created another fantastic side project (that doesn't feel like a side project) called ESP Ohio. He has reunited with Guided by Voices guitarist/Lifeguards collaborator Doug Gillard. Travis Harrison (drummer / Lifeguards engineer) and Mark Shue (current GBV bassist) provide the powerful rhythm section.   Each single contains two non-LP b-sides

Pollard, Robert

Not In My Airforce

GBV Inc

Guided By Voices Inc. is more excited than a bucket of photo-excited electrons to announce the 20th anniversary reissue of Robert Pollard’s first solo album Not In My Airforce. Originally released by Matador Records on September 10, 1996, the album includes several songs that have become fan favoritesand staples of GBV live shows throughout the years: “Psychic Pilot Clocks Out,” “Flat Beauty,” “Quicksilver,” “Get Under It,” and “Maggie Turns To Flies,” among others. Other album tracks have inspired a band name (“Release The Sunbird”), a music blog (“The Ash Gray Proclamation”) and a record label (“Prom Is Coming”). We’re pretty sure that at least one British nuclear missile-equipped submarine has been named after “Parakeet Troopers,” but MI6 refuses to confirm. The vinyl version of the album includes a six-song seven-inch single, which was the original plan in 1996, before the bean-counters insisted on combining the bonus songs with the CD and LP. These bonus songs (“Party,” “Did It Play?,” “Double Standards Inc.,” “Punk Rock Gods,” “Meet My Team,” and “Good Luck Sailor”) swelled the original release to 22 songs—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Everyone can agreethat more Bob is good. The charming, good-looking, record-buying public would like to hear NIMAF as both God and Bob originally intended. This is a landmark recording in the Pollardian corpus, in that it both presaged the flood of solo albums, side projects, collaborations, and line-up changes to come, and established the precedent that Robert Pollard, whether solo or in concert with his...

Guided By Voices

Please Be Honest

GBV Inc

Robert Pollard wrote and recorded and played all the instruments on Please Be Honest, and when he finished, it felt to him like a Guided By Voices record. He’s not wrong. The songs are compact and tuneful, the playing expertly slack, the production raw and unpolished: sounds pretty much like every review of Bee Thousand.  A better cognate, however, might be Vampire on Titus, Pollard’s 1993 pre-Bee Thousand (somewhat overlooked) lo-fi tour de force. On that record, Pollard similarly played every instrument—though his drumming skills then were so rudimentary that he had to record the bass drum and the snare parts separately, which is no longer the case—and as with everything he does, it’s about the songs, man. Of which Please Be Honest has no shortage, fifteen of them clocking in at just over 33 minutes. The point being there’s precedent for a GBV record where Pollard plays everything, and maybe more importantly there’s a reason for that precedent. Robert Pollard is Guided By Voices. This has never not been true, certainly, and is now more true than ever. He delights in confounding expectations, and you have to at least suspect that after over 20 years of making records under any number of pseudonyms, of which Guided By Voices is just one, and maybe not even his favorite one, he chafes at the notion that there exists some Platonic ideal of “Guided By Voices” that isn’t just Bob writing and recording the songs with whatever musicians he wants to...

Guided By Voices

Suitcase 4: Captain Kangaroo Won The War

GBV Inc

Presenting Suitcase 4: Captain Kangaroo Won the War, another astonishing installment of 100 Guided By Voices rarities, demos, alternate versions, outtakes and discards spanning over two decades of Robert Pollard’s career.  Highlights are early versions of classic Pollard songs from Propellor (1992), Vampire on Titus (1993), Bee Thousand (1994), Alien Lanes (1995), Isolation Drills (2001), Earthquake Glue (2003), Class Clown Spots a UFO (2012), as well as 2015 demos previewing Pollard’s much talked about 2016 solo album Of Course You Are.  Included here are versions of “Wished I Was a Giant,” “Postal Blowfish,” “Goldheart Mountaintop,” “Quality Of Armor,” “Motor Away,” “Hardcore UFOs,” “Echos Myron,” “Dirty Water,” “Tractor Rape Chain (Clean It Up),” “Queen Of Cans And Jars,” “Glad Girls,” “He Rises! Our Union Bellboy,” “Long as the Block Is Black” and many more. This limited-edition set is comprised of four CDs, a 24-page booklet with original artwork, a ten-panel digipack and a custom magnifying glass to view the back cover titles.

Ricked Wicky

Swimmer To A Liquid Armchair

GBV Inc

Dayton, Ohio-based supergroup Ricked Wicky pulls off a rarely ventured and even more rarely gained three-peat with its third album—all recorded and released in the span of a year—Swimmer to a Liquid Armchair. The quartet, led by Robert Pollard and seconded mostly by multi-instrumentalist Nick Mitchell, with assists from Kevin March on drums and Todd Tobias on bass, have amped Pollard’s already wildly prolific output to Jason-Statham-in-Crank-2 levels. Swimmer serves up the same gleefully messy prog / punk / pop stew as on the previous two Ricked Wicky releases, but there’s a growing sense of assurance evident on the newest record that indicates Big Things for the future. We draw your attention in particular to “Poor Substitute,” as straightforward a song as Pollard has ever written, emotionally charged, melancholy, executed with rough vigor by the band and sung with unaffected mastery. Contrast this with the following song, which showcases Mitchell’s more polished songwriting approach (and abundant guitar chops) and his vibrant, albeit less elastic, tenor voice. If Guided By Voices, Pollard’s other other band, often bear comparison to the Beatles, Ricked Wicky on occasion calls to mind a kind of lo-fi Blue Öyster Cult, with a touch of early Queen (Mitchell’s slide work on “The Blind Side” recalls Brian May). Those accustomed to more standard Pollardian fare will find plenty to chew on here: the virtuosic wordplay on album opener “What Are All Those Paint Men Digging,” the thumping thug-rock of “Red-Legged Pygmalion,” the epic sweep (in three minutes) of...

Ricked Wicky

Number I Can Trust

GBV Inc

***Two new singles from the upcoming third album from Dayton, Ohio-based supergroup RICKED WICKY. The quartet, led by ROBERT POLLARD and seconded mostly by multi-instrumentalist NICK MITCHELL, with assists from KEVIN MARCH on drums and TODD TOBIAS on bass, have amped Pollard’s already wildly prolific output to Jason-Statham-in-Crank-2 levels. The band serves up the same gleefully messy prog / punk / pop stew as on the previous two Ricked Wicky releases, but there’s a growing sense of assurance evident on the newest record that indicates Big Things for the future.

Ricked Wicky

Poor Substitute

GBV Inc

***Two new singles from the upcoming third album from Dayton, Ohio-based supergroup RICKED WICKY. The quartet, led by ROBERT POLLARD and seconded mostly by multi-instrumentalist NICK MITCHELL, with assists from KEVIN MARCH on drums and TODD TOBIAS on bass, have amped Pollard’s already wildly prolific output to Jason-Statham-in-Crank-2 levels. The band serves up the same gleefully messy prog / punk / pop stew as on the previous two Ricked Wicky releases, but there’s a growing sense of assurance evident on the newest record that indicates Big Things for the future.

Ricked Wicky

King Heavy Metal

GBV Inc

King Heavy Metal, the second release from Robert Pollard’s self-described “supergroup” (tongue practically piercing his cheek with self-deprecating irony), is a hitherto undiscovered species of rainforest songbird capable of changing colors in the ultraviolet and infrared spectrums. At once prog-struck, collagist, technically impressive and melodically complex, King Heavy Metal lives up to and subverts its title over the course of its twelve songs. There’s stuff on here that wouldn’t be out of place on any post-Isolation Drills Guided By Voices album, stuff that wouldn’t be out of place on an alternate-universe mid-’70s Who album, and stuff that’s as lo-fi, booze-addled and sloppy as anything from “classic”-era GBV. Pollard’s determined to establish Ricked Wicky as more than just another solo or side project: it’s a proper, self-contained group with significant contributions, both instrumental and songwriting, from guitarist Nick Mitchell (long time GBV / Pollard stalwart Kevin March supplies drums). Mitchell sings lead on two songs here, both presumably written by him as well: “Imminent Fall From Grace” and “Weekend Worriers.” The latter is a kind of “A Salty Salute” update, with Pollard taking the anthemic first chorus, but Mitchell handling the rest of the vocals. Stranger, but in some ways more interesting, is Mitchell’s other contribution. “Imminent Fall From Grace” contains probably the most straightforward, earnest lyrics ever associated with a Pollard record—and yet, bizarrely, the song fits, and fits well, with the sort of no-fucks-given experimentation on display throughout King Heavy Metal. From the skewed-time-signature stomp (with periodic King Crimson-esque breakdowns) of...

Ricked Wicky

Jargon Of Clones

GBV Inc

Two 7” singles from KING HEAVY METAL, the forthcoming 2nd album by Ricked Wicky, the new project of Guided By Voices’ mastermind Robert Pollard, joined by GBV’s Kevin March (drums), long-time collaborator Todd Tobias (bass) and secret weapon, Nick Mitchell (guitar).    The A-sides are majestic and hook-filled - classic Pollard rock. The non-LP B-sides are written and sung by Mitchell. “Quite Worthy”: power pop / glam rock / 70s AM radio fuel this harmony-laden nod to Joseph Campbell-esque advice to “Follow Your Bliss.”    “Dissonance” is baroque chamber pop, acoustic guitar and cellos, harkening to early Jeff Lynne / Roy Wood.

Ricked Wicky

Tomfoole Terrific

GBV Inc

Two 7” singles from KING HEAVY METAL, the forthcoming 2nd album by Ricked Wicky, the new project of Guided By Voices’ mastermind Robert Pollard, joined by GBV’s Kevin March (drums), long-time collaborator Todd Tobias (bass) and secret weapon, Nick Mitchell (guitar).    The A-sides are majestic and hook-filled - classic Pollard rock. The non-LP B-sides are written and sung by Mitchell. “Quite Worthy”: power pop / glam rock / 70s AM radio fuel this harmony-laden nod to Joseph Campbell-esque advice to “Follow Your Bliss.”    “Dissonance” is baroque chamber pop, acoustic guitar and cellos, harkening to early Jeff Lynne / Roy Wood.

Pollard, Robert

Faulty Superheroes

GBV Inc

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays Robert Pollard from the swift completion of his latest brilliant record. Faulty Superheroes jets off Pollard’s vinyl-grooved runway like the prototype for some new supersonic power pop fighter jet, and at this point in his career is anyone surprised that the twelve tracks on his latest effort are uniformly awesome? The answer is no. Exactly no one is surprised. The biggest thing with which Pollard has to contend is his own miraculously consistent greatness. That he rarely—if ever—stumbles is some kind of marvel, and perhaps implies superpowers of his own. If you see what we did there. Faulty Superheroes has a tossed-off, effortless magnificence for which the rash of indie-whatevers trailing in his wake from Bee Thousand to the present constantly strive, and fail to achieve. The constant sense of surprise, of wonder, of discovery that one routinely finds in superbly structured instant bomp classics like “Faster the Great” is not something that can be taught, or learned, or imparted, or copied. Pollard largely abandoned the four-track 20 years ago and still gets tagged as “lo-fi,” which is a word that makes even less sense now in the days of digital recording than it did then in the days of occasionally tape-hiss smothered coulda-shoulda-been hits. “Take Me to Yolita” in lesser hands might not have been much more than a bad one-liner stretched to fit a pop song, but Pollard reverse-engineers the titular pun to build a Kinks-like mini-epic that...

Pollard, Robert

Up, Up And Up

GBV Inc

A teaser 7-inch to the upcoming new full-length, Faulty Superheroes, due May 26, 2015. Includes the album cuts “Up, Up and Up” and “Take Me to Yolita.” Includes a download.

Ricked Wicky

I Sell The Circus

GBV Inc

The first thing the listener will notice about Ricked Wicky is that it is the most musically adept project Guided By Voices’ mage Robert Pollard has undertaken in some time, at least since late period-GBV (Half-Smiles of the Decomposed, for instance), or even Boston Spaceships. “[Ricked Wicky] is a sophisticated arena rock band,” says Pollard, and I Sell the Circus offers in evidence a series of ball-peen hammers to the brain-pan (“Piss Face” with its James Gang-era slide guitar and the proto-punk stomp of “Intellectual Types,” for example) alongside more delicate, prog-tinged Frippery (“Cow-Headed Moon” features Court of the Crimson King-esque mellotron, while the acoustic guitar mastery displayed on “Even Today and Tomorrow” recalls the mellow-era ELP of “Lucky Man”). Credit the players: bolstering the easy mastery of a dizzying array of songwriting forms one naturally expects (and receives) from Pollard are the impressive instrumental prowess of fellow Daytonian Nick Mitchell (“no blood relation to Mitch,” Pollard stresses); multi-instrumentalist and producer Todd Tobias; and “the worldly Kevin March,” (Pollard again) who does double duty these days in Guided By Voices. Fourteen of its fifteen tracks were recorded at Cyberteknics in Dayton, a studio Pollard has come to use with increasing frequency due to its profusion of vintage analog gear. “Rotten Backboards” is as gorgeous and melancholic a tune as Pollard has ever written, and lyrically sounds a note of wistfulness that long-time fans will not find unfamiliar. “She can run, ’cause that’s what I did,” sings Pollard over a sublimely textured background...

Ricked Wicky

Death Metal Kid

GBV Inc

***Extremely limited singles from new Robert Pollard group in advance of their full length. Non-LP b-side!

Ricked Wicky

Mobility

GBV Inc

***Extremely limited singles from new Robert Pollard group in advance of their full length. Non-LP b-side!

Ricked Wicky

Piss Face

GBV Inc

***Extremely limited singles from new Robert Pollard group in advance of their full length. Non-LP b-side!

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...

Guided By Voices

Cool Planet

GBV Inc

Conceived during the sub-freezing Polar Vortex of 2014, the next Guided By Voices record is Cool Planet.  It’s another wineskin full of great songs, recorded in a single proper studio for the first time since their inexhaustible reformation. There’s some unusually consistent and consistently awesome production on display, thanks to the array of vintage equipment on offer at Cyberteknics Creative Studios in Dayton, Ohio. Cool Planet also offers a weighty crunch that will lay you flat, perhaps due in part to the (re-)addition of late-version Guided By Voices tub-thumper Kevin March on drums.   Robert Pollard has talked in recent months about having refined his approach to songwriting (as if that was a thing that needed to happen) and the tunes he’s written for Cool Planet stack up against the best he’s ever done, including the hard-hitting title track, which just begs to be played live. Guitarist Tobin Sprout steps up with (among others) a Bowie-esque song (“Psychotic Crush”) and a Beatle-esque number (“All American Boy”). Look what Guided By Voices have done for the world since reforming in 2010. Six high-quality full-length albums in less than four years. And that’s not counting EPs, singles, tours, or solo records. If the sorry state of the present day indie-, alt- or just plain rock landscape is the disease, Guided By Voices is the cure! Do not take in moderation.

Guided By Voices

All American Boy / Eyesore Wives

GBV Inc

Limited to 1000 worldwide. All B-Sides are unreleased tracks with contributions from the rest of the band.

Guided By Voices

Authoritarian Zoo / Cool Planet Theme

GBV Inc

Limited to 1000 worldwide. All B-Sides are unreleased tracks with contributions from the rest of the band.

Guided By Voices

Males Of Wormwood Mars / A Year That Could Have Been Worse

GBV Inc

Limited to 1000 worldwide. All B-Sides are unreleased tracks with contributions from the rest of the band.

Guided By Voices

Table At Fool’s Tooth / Pillow Man

GBV Inc

Limited to 1000 worldwide. All B-Sides are unreleased tracks with contributions from the rest of the band.

Guided By Voices

Motivational Jumpsuit

GBV Inc

Motivational Jumpsuit is the latest, bestest release by reunited indie rock (whatever that means) juggernaut (means an unstoppable force) Guided By Voices. It speaks in several silvery tongues, and like last year’s English Little League takes many routes to the same shimmery, elusive destination: rock greatness. Its 20 songs (in 38 minutes!) range from the shaggy, Who Sell Out pop-pourri of “Evangeline Dandelion” to the lurching, rifferific “Planet Score,” breezing briskly through every worthwhile rock ’n’ roll style sheet along the way. Robert Pollard and co.’s influences are by now so thoroughly assimilated that Guided By voices referents are mostly to other Guided By Voices songs / eras: “Save the Company” calls to mind the band’s Bee Thousand / Alien Lanes lo-fi glory daze, while “Vote for Me Dummy” could be from Isolation Drills. For instance. Recent intramural turmoil aside (Guided By Voices has a long history of members quitting / getting fired / posting private correspondence online / waking up in the gutter), the band has never sounded more cohesive. Tobin Sprout’s insanely catchy feather-light confection “Record Level Love” bobs up against the deeply purple spray-paint rock of “I Am Columbus,” which pinballs into the elastic, sprightly “Difficult Outburst and Breakthrough”—the pacing and variety always seem to make some kind of higher sense, if only as an appeal to the senses. Motivational Jumpsuit is gangly, wordy, heavy, lovely, catchy, rocky, complexly simple, and better than almost any record you’ll hear this year. This is the fifth record (in three years) by...

Guided By Voices

Alex And The Omegas

GBV Inc

Guided By Voices

Planet Score

GBV Inc

Guided By Voices

Save The Company

GBV Inc

Guided By Voices

The Littlest League Possible

GBV Inc

Guided By Voices

Vote For Me Dummy

GBV Inc

Pollard, Robert

Blazing Gentlemen

GBV Inc

***Blazing Gentlemen is the last Robert Pollard record. That will be released in 2013. It is also the finest Pollard-related record to come out in this or several years, aural evidence of a rock mage reinvigorated by the fact, according to the man himself, that he's "finally figured out how to write a song after 55 years."  Which may come as a surprise even to casual fans of Pollard's thousands-strong catalog, and fair enough, Bob's certainly hip to the irony, but it's no joke. While he's explored pretty much every highway, toll road and dark alley of songcraft in his long career, including spontaneous "drum contests" where every member of Guided By Voices would be given the opportunity to come up with a drumbeat, over which he would then improvise a spontaneous melody based on semi-random lyrics from his ever-present notebook (for example), he's never before applied one consistent approach over the course of even one record. The new technique is considerably more disciplined: he first collects — in the (figuratively) selfsame notebook — phrases and titles, bits of overheard conversation, snatches of misheard movie dialogue, thus providing an assortment of lines all of which he considers strong enough to serve as potential song titles. He then assembles these song titles into lyrics, which because each line is strong enough to stand on its own, contain neither bloat nor the least misstep. When he's happy with the lyrics, he writes a melody for each lyric. He then sits down with...

Pollard, Robert

Return Of The Drums

GBV Inc

Second single from the upcoming album Blazing Gentlemen. Limited to 1000 worldwide.

Pollard, Robert

Tonight’s The Rodeo

GBV Inc

Robert Pollard returns with his latest single Tonight’s the Rodeo. The A-side is a preview from a forthcoming 2014 solo album; “Astral City Slicker” is the full three-minute-plus version of the 51-second “Suit Minus the Middle” from Honey Locust Honky Tonk.

Pollard, Robert

Honey Locust Honky Tonk

GBV Inc

Honey Locust Honky Tonk is a compact wonder and so varied, tuneful, graceful, magnificent and ebullient that one will be forgiven for thinking that Robert Pollard has saved his best for his own album. Slicker in some ways than recent Guided By Voices efforts, though not without its own down-home charm, its 17 songs whiz by in 34 minutes, stridently showcasing Pollard’s songwriting mastery with some of the best tunes he’s ever penned. The longest, the semi-stately album closer “Airs,” clocks in at just over three and a half minutes, but most are in the two- or two-and-half-minute range typical of Pollard’s attenuating genius. “I’m not afraid to be immature, to make a fool of myself,” he recently offered as a reason why he’s been able to continue writing music at such a high level for so long. “I’m not afraid to look insane.” The only thing crazy about a song like “It Disappears in the Least Likely Hands (We May Never Not Know)” is its slightly loopy title. The song itself, a chugging Heroes-era Bowie anthem whose entire lyrics are contained in the title, is a marvel of both concision and affect, featuring the full force and range of Pollard’s voice, which has never sounded better. For any other guy whose reunited band just finished putting out four full albums and an EP in 18 months, the release of yet still again another solo album might seem excessive, to say the least, but Honey Locust Honky Tonk sees Pollard in top songwriting form....

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.

Guided By Voices

English Little League

GBV Inc

English Little League—the fourth album from the reunited “classic” Guided By Voices lineup of Robert Pollard, Tobin Sprout, Greg Demos, Mitch Mitchell and Kevin Fennell—hums like angry birds along the full spectrum of rock’s highways and byways (especially the byways), from rock to roll and back again. Pollard’s rebus system of songwriting (sounds made visible, abstract concepts symbolized) strung like fairy lights from the opening song “Xeno Pariah” to the galvanic closer “With Glass in Foot,” kettles along at full steam throughout, punctuated by the airier constructs of Sprout (“The Sudden Death of Epstein’s Ways,” with its sweet / creepy emphatic refrain of “Jesus,” is a particular standout).  The Guided By Voices project, as any fan knows, both requires and rewards effortful listening, and lazybones who dismiss the volume of Pollard’s output as (basically) impossible misunderstand the care with which he assembles his dreamscapes. Whiny types will thus be dismayed to learn that Pollard has recently installed a studio in his house (first fruits can be found on “A Burning Glass,” among others here), the better to transform his oneiric musings to immediate art, but converts to the clubhouse will be overcome—some will, in fact, faint—at the news. The plan at present is to release three Guided By Voices albums per year until the end of time, but in the world according to Robert Pollard, “plans” does not mean what it means to you and me. “Plans” to him are moving ideas caught momentarily in stasis, and subject as often...

Guided By Voices

Noble Insect

GBV Inc

The fifth single from English Little League, “Noble Insect” continues the noble tradition of Pollard writing a song over a Sprout instrumental (see, for example, “Hot Freaks”). In this case, the result is practically Japanese. The flip features jaunty Sprout piano-based shard “Waves of Gray” and a similarly piano-based, though Lennon-raw, Pollard snippet called “See You Soon.” We have every reason to believe he means it.

Guided By Voices

Xeno Pariah

GBV Inc

The fourth single from English Little League, Guided By Voices’ first album of 2013, “Xeno Pariah” will rip the heart out of your chest and put it back a little sadder and wiser. B-side “Little Jimmy the Giant” is a garagey reprise of one of the oldest songs ever written by Guided By Voices (included on the first Suitcase compilation, it was originally recorded in 1984.)

Guided By Voices

Trash Can Full Of Nails

GBV Inc

“Trash Can Full of Nails” is the third single from English Little League. Its propulsive, off-kilter rhythm underscores the melancholic melody, delivered with characteristic aplomb by songwriter Robert Pollard. Backed with a Tobin Sprout-penned psych-pop song called “Build A Bigger Iceberg,” which is solid advice.

Guided By Voices

Islands

GBV Inc

The second single from the upcoming LP English Little League features a typically lush Tobin Sprout pop construction, “Islands (She Talks in Rainbows),” which could have come off an early (very early) Bee Gees record. It’s backed with the sweet acoustic ballad “She Wore Blue and Green” and a deranged piano- and echo-soaked psych workout, “Full Framed Luberon.”

Guided By Voices

Flunky Minnows

GBV Inc

The first single from the upcoming Guided By Voices long-player English Little League is a classic Pollard-penned power-pop gem, as catchy as anything in the band’s canon. B-side “Jellypop Smiles,” a reverb-heavy acoustic number with out-of-tune recorder, wouldn’t sound out of place next to Bee Thousand’s “Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory.”