Nowhere To Go But Up

Albumbeschreibung

40 years and nearly as many official albums in, it's amazing that Guided by Voices isn't constantly repeating themselves. While they're not breaking brand new ground with every release, the music is diverse enough to make band's tendency to churn out multiple albums a year seems driven by inspiration more than mere compulsion. Even Nowhere to Go But Up, the band's third studio effort of 2023 and 39th long-player overall, stands apart from the two records that preceeded it by months, as much as it carves out a new space for itself in the lengthy GbV saga that's been mutating since the early '80s. Where La La Land broke up its art-prog experimentalism with Beatles-y pop melodies and Welshpool Frillies leaned into onstage excitement by recording live to tape (both of these albums were also released in 2023), Nowhere to Go But Up finds the band embracing over-the-top production power. The album starts with Phil Spector levels of pop enthusiasm with the anthem-like "The Race Is On, The King Is Dead." It's all loud, melodic guitars and bashing drums, but the melodies are backed up by chiming bell tones and string sounds deep in the mix, making for one of the more orchestrated GbV tunes and a perfect backdrop for especially memorable vocal lines from Robert Pollard. The entire first half of the album is driving, excellently-produced power pop. Songs like "Stabbing at Fractions" and "Puncher's Parade" are beefed-up versions of the kind of tunefully melancholy, mid-tempo songs Pollard used to record exclusively on cheap cassette four tracks, benefiting here from studio sheen and clarity without completely losing their mystery. Of course, the band wanders into weirdness before too long, indulging in a lengthy Who-like intro on the otherwise absurd abstract rock of "Love Set" and flexing their prog rock powers on "Jack of Legs," complete with epic and declamatory horns and a song structure that rarely repeats a section. By the end, Nowhere to Go But Up grows more compositionally adventurous, but saves some catchiness for even its most complexly-mapped songs. The element that sets the album apart from other recent GbV output isn't the songwriting as much as the sound they achieve; a nearly slaphappy implementation of the studio as a way to make Pollard's oddball musings and occasional heart-rending turns of phrase bigger than ever.

© Fred Thomas /TiVo