“I’m a student of hooks,” Guided by Voices ringleader Robert Pollard told Rolling Stone, “that perfect combination of a lyric and a chord pattern that gives you that chill up the back of your spine.” If his studies haven’t earned him a PhD in Hookology yet, there’s something seriously wrong with the state of academia: the man has registered 2,671 compositions with BMI (hell, he’ll probably have written one or two more by the time you’re done reading this review), consisting of some of the catchiest British Invasion-inspired alt/indie/power pop gems ever penned by anybody.
And yet here is Pollard, returning with GBV’s 42nd(!) album and still finding ways to supply those chills. It helps immensely that he’s hit a groove with the band’s current lineup, the most stable of its existence: Pollard, guitarists Doug Gillard and Bobby Bare Jr., bassist Mark Shue, and drummer Kevin March have recorded 19 albums together in the past 9 years, and his collaboration with Gillard and March goes back even further than that. Gillard’s bright, muscular leads define the GBV sound as much as Pollard’s songwriting these days, and the power pop sound he helped usher into the band way back on 1997’s Mag Earwhig! is still definitely in full effect on Thick Rich and Delicious.
Pollard also told Rolling Stone that Thick Rich and Delicious was an attempt to capture the feel of a GBV live show (always a loud, raucous affair), and man, does he accomplish that goal. Pretty much every GBV album has tossed off asides, half-formed acoustic songs, and weird sonic experiments that shift the tempo. Here, even the barely-longer-than-a-minute tunes add to the album’s amped-up mood: check the guitar riff on “Dance of the Picnic Arms” that chugs like Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again,” or “Ozark Ivanho,” which drives and grooves like classic Aerosmith. Other highlights on the album include the bouncy single “(You Can’t Go Back to) Oxford Talawanda,” the Who-style drive of “Replay,” and the guitars that chime and churn throughout “The Lighthouse Resurrection.”
The album’s peak, though, is the delectably Beatles-esque “A Tribute to Beatle Bob,” a memorial to our late, local rock n’ roll hero packed with big, sunny melodies and a spiky, George Harrison-esque guitar solo from Gillard. (It’s actually the band’s second tribute to our city’s most controversial concert attendee; check out their 2003 video for “My Kind of Soldier”.) “Yeah, and he’ll be there for you,” Pollard sings, followed by as delightfully Pollardian a couplet as he’s ever sung: “In vintage clothes/ And punk rock nose.”
Is Thick Rich and Delicious the best Guided by Voices album? No, but what does that even mean? Every few months, Pollard gifts us with another set of hooks, some good, some just okay, and some downright transcendent in their perfection. Nothing on Thick Rich and Delicious approaches those transcendent peaks of songs like “Glad Girls,” “Game of Pricks,” or “I Am a Scientist,” but it’s still catchy as all get-out and has a sonic consistency that’s rare for a GBV album. Thank you, Robert Pollard, for serving up this tasty Halloween treat. | Jason Green
