The Best of Guided By Voices: Human Amusements at Hourly Rates, With Surgical POLLcus

i really like "teenage fbi." it's smoother and higher-falutin than the classic era works but it still has a great melody and lines that are profound and cryptic in the typical pollard fashion. i've always loved the line "when you're around me, i'm somebody else"

I've never liked Doug Gillard's guitar playing tbh.

xp the problem is there's no quality control anymore, he might still produce one good album's worth of songs a year but it's spread across 3 albums

this one seems to have rolled a high number of them though

also his singing is getting noticeably worse yeah

doesn't help that some fans cry wolf on every new one being the best one in a while so i've stopped believing it. but here i am perpetuating it by saying that Earth Man Blues is in fact the one

Propeller is a bit misleadingly represented on this comp. Both great songs, but they don't exactly reflect the big classic rock sound on that album. I guess it'd be hard to include "Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox" anywhere but as the first track.

they should have, a salty salute is iconic too but not on the level of that one

XXXXP Wait, maybe "Hold on Hope" was the first single off of Do The Collapse and it doesn't appear here at all, so ignore my flawed logic above. But I think Bob hated the Ocassik production of that song too, so maybe that's why it didn't appear here. At any rate, searching for the truth about Hold on Hope, I found out that Glen Campbell covered it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_y7bOKXOlg

Pollard hated the song too, not just the production.

i remember pollard badmouthing "hold on hope" even before it came out, which probably wasn't the best move.

xp the problem is there's no quality control anymore, he might still produce one good album's worth of songs a year but it's spread across 3 albums

Over the last several years I find that I really like the first album they put out in a given year (e.g. Earth Man Blues), but any that come out after that are largely forgettable. This may be by design.

I need a comp like this for the reunion era. No idea where to start with that stuff.

electricsound chose these songs from the first wave of reunion albums, though obviously there have been fifty more records since then

I've never liked Doug Gillard's guitar playing tbh.

The early 90s albums already sound like compilations of cut and pasted ephemeral am rock radio fragments, so it seems weird to me to cut them out again and paste them into this compilation alongside the slick “professional” stuff. it’s like two different bands. The balance is off.

speak kindly of your volunteer fire department is a sweet Dillard-era album

lol Gillard

xp I think it works, but then I've listened to this compilation a lot so I'm used to it. The shifts from polished to lo-fi and back are cool. And the fragmentary GBV style is kind of downplayed - the selections from the lo-fi period tend to be fleshed-out songs. "Hit" stands out to me as the only real odds-and-ends style selection.

Several live staples from that era were on Speak Kindly.

xp, I'll have to listen to this because of what you said about shifts in production. Recently, on a mix of my favorite songs from another lo-fi band, I had to deal with finding the best track progression which isn't simple.

Several live staples from that era were on Speak Kindly.

When I saw them in 2000, he introduced the songs from this record thus: "Speak kindly of your volunteer fire department... cos they just might save your flaming asshole".

not sure there are even 20 songs of this quality from the reunion era sadly. "overloaded" is the only one i can think of that i would put on this

Dang, this is a fantastic song. From the credits it doesn't look like Bob had anything to do with it - it's drummer Kevin March's song (including vocals).

"Trust Them Now" on Earth Man Blues is a gem.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

got it down to 4 or 5 contenders that i love roughly equally; pulled the lever for Teenage FBI (sorry, calstars!).

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

thanks for voting, everyone! i love the really wide spread here, so many 1-vote picks. and the old-schoolers can take comfort in the cumulative totals for the mid-90s material.

I voted “Game of Pricks.” Can’t believe “Motor Away” only got two votes.

I love it but voted for Tractor, just shows you how great the top tier stuff is in general

(referring to "Motor Away")