Guided by Voices

Fresh off a summer tour in support of their latest album, Space Gun, Robert Pollard’s prolific Guided By Voices have announced a massive new double-album called Zeppelin Over China. The band’s second double-album after last year’s August By Cake (which also happened to be their 100th LP overall) is due out February 1st.

On March 9, GBV released Ogre’s Trumpet, a limited-edition (1,000 on double vinyl, 1,000 on CD), 25-track live album recorded last August in Asbury Park, N.J. (Greetings, kids.) The set features a healthy dose of songs from last year’s How Do You Spell Heaven and August By Cake, as well as classics like “Motor Away,” “I Am A Scientist,” “Tractor Rape Chain,” “Game Of Pricks” and “Glad Girls” and a cover of the Monkees’ “Saturday’s Child.”

Guided By Voices is now an unlikely candidate for the most perfect rock band of all time, while at the same time being a thoughtful reflection on what a rock band is, a fantasy that becomes a fact. Sweating The Plague, the band's 29th album and their third this year, spars playfully with stadium-sized fidelity and uncharacteristically impactful arrangements.

Guided By Voices’ August By Cake is the one hundredth studio album that Robert Pollard has released since 1986’s Forever Since Breakfast. To put that in perspective, Bob Dylan has released roughly thirty nine studio albums since 1959. And that includes the Traveling Wilburys. This is a highly anticipated record, which includes the new line-up (returning GBV veterans Doug Gillard and Kevin March, virgins Bobby Bare Jr and Mark Shue) that has been wowing audience in clubs and festivals throughout 2016. It’s the most musically adept and versatile line-up Pollard has ever assembled.

Starting off the year with a 100-song marathon in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve, Robert Pollard is setting a mighty high bar for Guided By Voices in 2020. Following three acclaimed and stylistically distinct full-length albums in 2019, Surrender Your Poppy Field, is a head-spinning tour de force: a bit of everything… plus more! And hands down the most adventurous GBV album ever. There are lo-fi four-track tape recordings, there are songs recorded with a single microphone in a basement, there are big studio fully-produced hook-laden pop songs, and there is a lot in between. Seemingly, the guiding concept of Surrender Your Poppy Field was to make the songs sound as different from one another as possible: sudden shifts in mood, tempo and rhythm, unexpected chord progressions, false endings and codas, string orchestrations, mysterious voices…