Placebo Never

Styles We Paid For is Guided By Voices’ third album of 2020 and it stands as a testament to this Year In Isolation, reflecting these dark days through Robert Pollard’s prism, with the band sounding as confident and authoritative as ever. The fifteen tracks were recorded remotely during quarantine from five states (Ohio, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Tennessee) to comprise GBV’s ninth album since 2017.

Kind of an offshoot of the Marc Moulin world of the early 70s - the self-titled album from Plus, a group made up of musicians from the funky combo Placebo! The vibe is much more open than Placebo, but still shares lots of that group's great talent for mixing together jazz, funk, and trippy bits of prog - all in a way that's never too overindulgent, and always with a nice punch on most of the cuts - so that there's plenty of funky moments too! Drums are great, keeping things very interesting - and the horn passages run from Afro-styled lines with a nice exotic quality, to straighter jazz rock - augmented by some gritty vocals from time to time - in a raspy style that's kind of a 70s update of soulful UK mod styles of the previous generation.

Filmmaker, Stephen Kroschel, sets out to find hard evidence of the effectiveness of the Gerson Therapy, a long-suppressed natural cancer treatment. His travels take him across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, from upstate New York to San Diego to Alaska, from Japan to Holland and Mexico. In the end, he presents the testimony of patients, scientists, surgeons and nutritionists, who testify to the effectiveness of the Gerson Therapy and shows the hard scientific evidence to back up their claims.

The second album by Rupert Hine's fake group Thinkman. "Life Is A Full Time Occupation" is a collection split between songs that continued the media-manipulation theme from the first album and some dance-oriented songs written for an unfinished project of mine whose working title was The Placebo Effect.