Guided By Voices

★★★★

It’s Not Them. It Couldn’t Be Them. It Is Them!

CD/DL/LP

It couldn’t be album 34. It is album number 34!

One corollary of Robert Pollard’s fecund writing compulsion is that if you don’t like one song, there’ll be another along in a jiffy. Still a potent totem for the cult of odd, he’s currently averaging three GBV albums per annum, and this scuzzier accessory to April’s faux rock opera Earth Man Blues entrenches the sense that 2021 may be a vintage year. Idiosyncrasy and eccentricity his watchwords, messages always cryptic, voice not without a hint of Michael Stipe, Pollard animates job descriptions less-celebrated (see Maintenance Man Of The Haunted House), reinvents Burt Bacharach on The Bell Gets Out Of The Way, and brings an XTC-ish bloom to the downtempo powerpop of Cherub And The Great Child Actor. “I collect the clouds of morning,” he sings on the latter. And somehow turns them into songs, it seems.