Album of the Week | Guided By Voices: Nowhere To Go But Up

For bands that have stretched their lifespans across multiple decades, there is an urge to point towards certain “golden eras” as signifiers when recommending new releases. If we’re being completely honest, many artists with long careers are forever chained to the work they do within a specific decade—whether it be by critical anointment or simply a product of fans, who’ve stayed on from the beginning, choosing to hold tight to the nostalgia of their youth. What makes being a true obsessive fan of the poetically inebriated and unrivaled prolific work of Robert Pollard and his main songwriting outlet Guided By Voices is that, with such a feverish release schedule and an infantry-sized list of past members, it’s harder to pinpoint specific moments of greatness—especially as pages in the history book are being typed out, even as you are reading this review.

A new earworm is written in the blink of an eye, and a new fan obtains membership in the ever-expanding Pollard-verse. To be a Guided By Voices fan is to be happy within your place orbiting around a flaming sun that, somehow, still burns as aggressively as it did in the early 1990s. You can make little pitstops on inviting planets like GBV or way-station side projects like Circus Devils or Boston Spaceships. Pollard’s weirdo pop light reaches all of them in due time. But much like the sun rising and setting, Pollard’s consistency with his craft can easily be taken for granted.

With their third album from this year (and 39th overall), Nowhere To Go But Up, Pollard takes a lyric from an older song in the repertoire, “Fine To See You” (from the band’s Who’s Next-sized 2001 opus Isolation Drills). It’s interesting to consider the source, as the completion of that line in the song is: “You know that for I tell you.” In context with the absolutely unprecedented winning streak Pollard and the current version of Guided By Voices have been on, he wouldn’t be wrong in feeling that way with the strength of this collection of songs. It’s like he pointed to left field and launched a home run that connected with a U.F.O. trying to get closer to all of the beautiful commotion. The album is an unabashed, bombastic and unapologetic statement of purpose from one of America’s greatest living songwriters.

After Pollard dissolved the “classic lineup,” which reunited in 2012 and released six full-lengths in the span of two years, the songwriter brought in two of his greatest collaborators from the band’s hard rock era from the mid-‘90s to early 2000s: the locomotive drummer Kevin March and mesmerizing guitarist and co-writer Doug Gillard. Along with bassist Mark Shue and guitarist Bobby Bare Jr., fans have been treated with 15 full-length albums since 2017, all of which have shot above and beyond the typical standards of what one might expect from a pace that has dwarfed any previous incarnation of the group. While each album has weighed favorably in the power pop gem-to-admirable dud ratio, saying that only a few of those albums out of the bunch have found the tight precision and perfection as albums like Isolation Drills is a strange gripe to have. Yet that’s exactly what Nowhere To Go But Up delivers. Well, within Pollard’s own terms and conditions at least.

The album leads off with a church bell and mellotron-aided stomp of “The Race Is On, The King Is Dead,” the most jubilant and immediate opener the band has released since the title track from 2018’s Space Gun. The song is another trophy fish Pollard can happily hang on his wall. But what is astonishing about this album is just how little it waivers from there. The tunefulness between both Pollard’s sturdy melodies and Gillard’s muscular riffs have worked in tandem to dizzying effect in the past, but the two haven’t complimented each other’s strengths this well in, perhaps, the entire run of this “new classic lineup” of the band—as they create the right balance of heft and hooks throughout.

Everything just fits, and there are only a few stop-and-start, proggy shifts in tempo that Pollard has enjoyed lately—all of which pay off beautifully here. Songs like “Puncher’s Parade” and “For The Home” are small triumphs in melody that provide sleight of hand over the building arrangements underneath. Before you know it, you’re humming along to the tune and pumping your fist rather than noticing just how many complex parts are moving all at once.

One of Pollard’s superpowers is his ability to create earworms with even the smallest tossed off lines. If you were to set up a focus group of 50 diehard fans in a room, you’d probably get 50 different answers of what their favorite Pollard hook is—and they’d probably ask why you’re not serving Miller Lite during the experiment. Nowhere To Go But Up tests this theory, as it has no reoccurring lines in the songs’ choruses, with only two repeated lyrics across the album’s 40-minute runtime. Sure, Pollard’s strength for melody is a given, but what this album also showcases is his underrated ability as a lyricist, as he often creates poetic collages of words that may seem like non-sequiturs upon first glance but, sure enough, reveal their wisdom once you drop your guard.

Who else can write a lyric like “Dream fingers / Are smudging the blue prints” in a way that can seem, all at once, nonsensical yet immensely profound? Not to mention, Pollard sings it with a raised-beer-in-hand conviction. He has always been a tricky lyricist to decode, but upon sitting with his words, you start to realize that he is self-aware within the universe he has created. The evacuation map isn’t getting any clearer in “Stabbing at Fractions”; he addresses this head-on in another moment of self-reference—mentioning the 1986 Sandbox tune “Long Distance Man” in the winding “Jack Of Legs.” He contemplates the long-game he has played with his massive body of work and where it has left him. “An eternity in the fraternity / Of long distance men,” he sings.

In an interview with Matt Pinfield on MTV in 1996—outside of the WHFS festival in Washington, D.C.—Pollard voiced his displeasure of Guided By Voices consistently playing “the B Stage” at festivals. This kind of underdog spirit has always fueled the exuberance in Pollard’s vocal performances both onstage and within their best work. “You can be anything they told you to / You can belittle every little voice that told you so” he proclaimed in the Alien Lanes classic “Motor Away,” and that “Fuck it, I’ll show you” attitude has driven Pollard to out-work his peers time and time again. The only problem is, at 66 years old, he has reached the height of where he can perform with Guided By Voices. They have, no doubt, cemented themselves as one of America’s great cult rock and roll bands, but that means the B Stage is home. But, as he has said before, it’s hard to run out of gas rounding the bases playing in the “Littlest League Possible.”

If there is a criticism with how the past dozen-ish records have come across, it’s that Pollard’s vocals never seem to charge towards the gates of rock heaven like they did in his hungriest days. To have the recordings keep up with his writing, their long-time producer and sound engineer Travis Harrison has kept to a certain schedule—often recording the band together and allowing Pollard to record his vocals for each song at his own leisure back in Dayton, or wherever he may be. This comfortability of not having to prove himself in a big studio shows through in his vocal delivery on records, as he never quite belts out lyrics in the triumphant manor he does in front of a packed house of fans singing along—rather opting for double-tracked singing that favors the sweeter end of his range.

There is no doubt that these songs will blast off live, as Pollard has never shied away from the spotlight. In a true “not leaving the mound until the last pitch moment,” he almost became sick on-stage singing his guts out, as the band delivered an unheard of 100-song set at a New Year’s Eve show in 2019. And there really is no precedent for a band like Guided By Voices, or an artistic visionary like Robert Pollard. With so many essential entries still being released even after his 40th year of piloting the ship, how could you not trust the man at his word when he gives it to you so plain and simple? There’s Nowhere To Go But Up, as Pollard tells us. The race is on, the king is dead, but Guided By Voices remain infinite.