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

its a good comp yeah but their mid-90s run (bee thousand, alien lanes, under the bushes under the stars) has the same density of hooks as this without any paring down necessary

^^^^^

Some days I think “Things I Will Keep” is their last great song.

yeah, I think that one of Pollard's primary strengths during that mid-1990s streak was his skill for sequencing — like side A of Bee Thousand to me is just a perfect run of tunes that add up to more than the sum of their parts. hard to pull those particular recordings out of that context for me.

This was a great intro to them at the time, would have absolutely recommended it as a first step, but may be superfluous now in the streaming era where people get into bands by algorithm.

I remember making a trip to a downtown record store specifically to get this; I might have changed my mind because I have 19 of the 32 songs from the original records.
I'd include Mag Earwhig as part of that "run" of excellent, consistent records. It's a shame that this compilation came out a year too early to include anything from Half Smiles Of The Decomposed, the last record of their original era and nearly as good.
Of the selections I know, only "Glad Girls" and "Surgical Focus" are just OK, but most of the selections are not atypical of the album tracks (you're bound to like most of the original albums if you like this). Listening to the songs I know, I decided to vote "Twilight Campfighter".

My intro to them too. I absolutely love this CD. I'm sure I bought Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, and Mag Earwhig very soon after.

I could vote for almost anything, but "The Best of Jill Hives" has been bouncing in my head recently so I'll go with that.

I guess maybe it's time I finally dig deeper! Interestingly a LOT of my favorite tracks are circa 2001-2003, but I like shiny poppy rock maybe a little more than lo-fi pop-rock. Chasing Heather Crazy, Glad Girls, Everywhere With Helicopter, Twilight Camp fighter.... Bops and anthems all.

But I also love a ton of the mid 90s items here and as of right now might be voting Teenage FBI. Basically I love a lot of these songs. A glad girl best friend got into this CD right along with me, used lyrics for her Diaryland entry titles, etc. It'll always be special.

Realized I misspoke though - I only saw GBV once, in Atlanta, it ruled. The other show was of course solo Pollard, immortalized thusly: Robert Polllard played his first solo show last night to a half empty crowd in Athens, GA

And I didn't go to that either!

Is this a greatest hits album?

Or a mix?

don't remember seeing this tracklist before but it looks pretty great, many of the best songs ever made are here.

if the 2001-03 tracks stand out then you can't go wrong with Isolation Drills or Earthquake Glue, both are pretty much perfect albums. I remember Universal Truths as the necessarily imperfect one in between, but should revisit.

come to think of it, Isolation Drills has at least two songs that beat any of the selected ones, incredible as that sounds

I would have chosen different tracks from the pre-Bee era to be represented here, but yeah this rules, gotta go with "Tractor Rape Chain"

fave memory of this band is seeing them play outdoors downtown in Eugene to like 6 people on the "Bee Thousand" tour, we were literally driving by and stopped to check it out. I had the Siltbreeze 7" and the Golden Hour 7" but hadn't heard anything else, obv I was blown away

Weird, my version of this is in chronological order. Apparently the one that came in the Hardcore UFO’s box is different than the standalone release.

25 to 28 is a memorable part of this mix for me. "Teenage FBI" feels like the peak in some way, and the final four songs the wind-down.

Echos Myron, Cut-Out Witch, or Game of Pricks

Hard for me to believe that people like anything from the Doug gillard era - I can’t listen to any of it. To me it’s a real step down in quality and sound

“tractor rape chain”

Weird, my version of this is in chronological order.

I can't help thinking that wouldn't be as good. The dramatic shifts in production are part of what I love about this compilation, e.g. "Drinker's Peace" into "Surgical Focus". The sequencing is really well done and almost always works to the songs' favour.

yeah I'd agree with that! also maybe contributes to it having an ebb and flow and kind of mini-climaxes like you mentioned above.

i don't think i ever knew they were one of those bands with a "classic" lineup followed by the "later" lineup. i always thought "I Am A Tree" for example just had to be one of their main, core songs, probably just from how it's placed here... somehow feels like a "we've reached full cruising altitude NOW, folks!!!" type song. and obviously it's just such an awesome rock anthem. but looking it up now, i guess it's from the controversial later phase.

Absolutely "Echos Myron," anthemic even in the context of all these other anthems. Or something like that.

Hard for me to believe that people like anything from the Doug gillard era

And here I am having just cast my vote for "I Am a Tree," a Doug Gillard song which was recorded by the group Gem 4 years before his time in GBV. (Gem being a Doug Gillard/Tim Tobias band which put out two EXCELLENT albums in the early '90s.)

"Pricks"

After listening to UTBUTS the other day for the first time in years I thought Cut Out Witch might be the ideal 'intro to GBV' song..
To Remake the Young Flyer being the first track from it on here is a major crime, I hate all Tobin Sprout songs but that's maybe the worst and the worst on the album.

"Atom Eyes" is on that album and is miles better. There's quite a few odd choices on this album.

that one is tolerable.

xp Atom Eyes is my favourite track on that record too, it's a Sprout number I think?

I've found something called the Guided by Voices Database which confirms Sprout wrote that number, goodbye spare time!

I hate all Tobin Sprout songs

You are the first GBV fan I have ever met who hates the Tobin songs

it's mainly his voice, which I find weak and warbly and especially ill-suited to the lo-fi production. something like little whirl just makes me want to curl up into a ball. atom eyes is an ok song I guess, though lacking in any of the spark found in pollard's.

i love little whirl

had to vote Exit Flagger. This comp is certainly superfluous in the streaming era but it was definitely my intro to GBV and I still love it a lot even after going thru the rest of the discography.

I like Tobin's songs but I see ledge's point.

FIrst response otm.

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

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

still love pollard and his songorrhea but wish "huffman prairie flying field" had remained the band proper's sign-off, it was a perfect ending

No “lethargy” no cred

i made a comp of "ok" songs from the reunion era but that was 5 years ago and they've put out 15 albums since then. nothing touches them at the top of their game tho. (Propeller and Bee 1000) Excited for Scalping the Guru to come out--I don't have a lot of these

https://www.rockathonrecords.com/guided-by-voices

voted for HOT FREAKS

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

^ One for the Horrible 2020s album titles thread

HOT FREAKS coming up on some playlist was what prompted us to pull up this comp for the drive. great song. just looked up the lyrics and am surprised to realize he says "thigh man," not "spy man."

Styles We Paid For is GBV’s third album of 2020 and

wow

HOT. FREAKS.

yeah after the initial few reunion albums pollard seems to have just decided to start releasing all the stuff that would have been solo pollard in the past as GBV

“tractor rape chain”

― k3vin k., Wednesday, October 19, 2022 9:55 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Compilation otm for picking the 7" version of "Pricks" and the LP version of "Hunting Knife"

This song is based around the end of a miserable relationship, using a metaphor based around a tractor harvesting rapeseed in the chorus to showcase the distance between people who are even physically close, moving in the same direction.

ohhh

This is welcome information.

yeah i seem to recall that one requiring my friend to post an explanatory diaryland addendum like "this is from a song lyric"

I enjoyed about half of the 2019 double album Zeppelin Over China, he's quite good at maintaining a "quite good" level of quality. The main problem is that his voice is starting to fray.

"my valuable hunting knife" is the one that speaks to me

hard choice of Teenage FBI over Game of Pricks

Really?

Teenage FBI? I must be listening to a different band

Man I think the last few years have been real strong. Maybe not to the heights of the mid 90s but not much is IMO.

It's the far superior EP version of "Teenage FBI", important to note

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

A couple years ago I attempted to come up with a sequel to Human Amusements, covering everything after that comp came out: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1idxGsnYtzSHZY2ipxQSdP. They've put out 6 albums since then.

xps I really like Teenage FBI as well, heretical opinion but Do the Collapse is right up there for me albums-wise, probably because it's the one I heard first

yeah based on these tracks Do The Collapse is one of the albums i'm most interested in turning to next! also "Teenage FBI" is one of the best combos here of a great anthemic chorus and a lyrical metaphor that truly hits with me --- "are you still being followed by the teenage FBI?" hell man, ain't we all.

realization: the main "Surgical Focus" riff is kind of them doing "Driver 8." works for me.

if i were forced to make this a 24-track comp, i'd probably drop "14 Cheerleader Coldfront," "Learning to Hunt," "Bulldog Skin," "To Remake the Young Flyer," "Hit," "The Official Ironmen Rally Song," "Non-Absorbing," and "Back to the Lake." i like some of those okay, but i wouldn't truly miss them if they were gone. so i guess i should definitely avoid Under the Bushes Under the Stars and Mag Earwhig!

Under the Bushes, Under the Stars is one of the best sequenced albums in music. It's also miles better than Do the Collapse, possibly the worst GBV album.

"Bulldog Skin" is pretty much the worst song on "Mag Earwhig".

do the collapse is cool they got a major label release and ric ocasek producing and pollard showed up with all his weirdest twistiest songs instead of straightforward rockers

isolation drills is the 'correction' on the latter point and is better but i'm glad they both exist for the juxtaposition

No one interested in GBV should avoid Under the Bushes. There were some big omissions from that album on this comp (like Don't Stop Now).

huh, ok! good to know, thanks y'all.

huh i just listened to last year's Earth Man Blues and this is way tighter than the several others i've heard from the past 5 years

I think they have a really good line-up right now (the "classic" line-up they reformed with was no longer that), and I usually like what I hear on the most recent albums. The problem is it's sort of a case of too much, too late.

"Bulldog Skin" was the lead single/video from Mag Earwhig & "Official Ironman Rally Song" was the lead single from Under the Bushes, so I think they kinda had to include them here. Bob purportedly didn't like Ocasik's synths all over Do The Collapse's single "Teenage FBI" as it's lead single, resulting in the EP version appearing on here.

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")