Guided By Voices

★★★★ Crystal Nuns Cathedral GBV INC. CD/DL/LP

Ninth album in three years, 12 songs in 38 minutes… but it’s a good ’un!

Robert Pollard’s troop, unlike postmillennial garage-rockers Osees and Ty Segall, have rarely deviated far from their original script, bashing out neo-classical punk-pop-rock, often at the lower end of the audio fidelity spectrum. Post-2012 re-formation productivity has only intensified lately: where last year’s Earth Man Blues and It’s

Not Them… gloriously nailed GBV’s rapid-fire gem-shower brief, CNC eases towards more sophisticated, thought-out, and unabashedly epic song construction. Given Pollard’s Who fixation, it’s less Meaty,

Beaty…, more Quadrophenia, administered by a firing lineup featuring ace guitarists Doug Gillard and Bobby Bare Jr., who magisterially navigate Re-Develop’s crunchy time signature, Birds In The Pipe’s psychedelic eccentricity and Excited Ones’ transition from two-chord bop-along to wonkily exploratory bridge. Expertly interwoven orchestration on smouldering opener Eye City and Climbing A Ramp doesn’t stop the rock, but actually boosts its authoritative power. Thirty-five albums in, incredibly, GBV are still scaling new heights.