Scalping the Guru

Album review

In the mid-'90s, Ohio band Guided by Voices were hitting their stride with the four-track cassette recorder, or as bandleader Robert Pollard affectionately referred to it, "the instant gratification machine." Pollard's classic rock-informed and melody-heavy songwriting met with an impatient, sometimes improvisatory recording process that resulted in brief, scrappy lo-fi pop gems. GbV output from this time like 1994's Bee Thousand is some of the strongest indie rock of its era as well as being emblematic of the lo-fi movement the band was at the forefront of, but their full albums were surrounded by nonstop lesser releases. Scalping the Guru draws from material originally released as four separate 7" EPs between 1993 and 1994, offering a peek into lesser-known songs from a creative high point that gave us some of the band's best-loved work. Meticulously stitched together from a scattered supply of demo-quality recordings, sequencing and flow were key to albums like Alien Lanes and Bee Thousand, and Scalping the Guru follows a similarly intentional architecture rather than just reissuing the tracks in the order they ran on their original formats. Because of this, ragers like "Glow Boy Butlers" fade into low-key acoustic, Beatles-y sketches like "Hey Aardvark," and it's never too long before one of Pollard's miniature masterpieces like "My Impression Now" shows up. The variance of styles goes even more extreme places than on their proper albums, plowing through the 32-second post-punk blast "Rubber Man" to get to hamfisted power pop anthem "Big School," and venturing into other psychedelic experiments and trashy rockers from there. The compilation clips along quickly, promising to change gears radically within a matter of minutes and always presenting a new idea to wash away the one that just passed. GbV's unfathomably prolific nature, especially in this phase, resulted in so much material that only 20 of the 28 tunes from the 7"s are included on Scalping the Guru, and incredible songs like "Dusted" and "Kisses to the Crying Cooks" from the Fast Japanese Spin Cycle EP don't make the final cut. Despite these omissions, the compilation does a good job of weeding out the filler, and exists as an annex of even more fleetingly amazing songwriting from GbV's defining era.

© Fred Thomas /TiVo