Surrender Your Poppy Field

Album review

Anyone who was shedding a tear at the Electrifying Conclusion of Guided by Voices in late 2004 would probably be taken aback if you had told them that the group would not only be back in action in the year 2020 but also in the midst of one of the most consistent hot streaks in their recording career. However, after Robert Pollard assembled a new and improved edition of GBV in 2016, the band released six albums that range from quite good (2019's Warp and Woof) to genuinely great (2017's How Do You Spell Heaven and 2019's Zeppelin Over China). 2020's Surrender Your Poppy Field puts the count up to seven, and it stands out stylistically from its immediate predecessors. Since Pollard debuted this GBV lineup -- Pollard on vocals, Doug Gillard and Bobby Bare, Jr. on guitars, Mark Shue on bass, and Kevin March on drums -- their songwriting and production has favored their leader's latter-day embrace of the twists and turns of prog rock rather than the lo-fi dense-pack pop hooks of their '90s breakthrough works. Surrender Your Poppy Field plays like an effort to find room for both sides of GBV's personality; while most of this was clearly not cut on a four-track cassette machine like Bee Thousand or Vampire on Titus, the group and producer Travis Harrison mixed up home recordings and rehearsal tapes with studio sessions, so numbers like "Year of the Hard Hitter" and "Queen Parking Lot" are layered in functional murk, and more clearly engineered tracks such as "Physician" and "Woah Nelly" make use of their own sorts of sonic clutter (the filtered vocals on the former, the ambience of an old 78 on the latter). Surrender Your Poppy Field leans to the grand scale in its melodies and arrangements, but Pollard was clearly in a playful mood when the band cut this material, and after appearing on well over a hundred albums, he still sounds engaged and looking for new angles, even finding some here and there. While Surrender Your Poppy Field is less immediately approachable than the other albums from this period in the Guided by Voices saga, it's experimental, not meandering, and for fans with a taste for their more esoteric side, this will hit the spot and then some.

© Mark Deming /TiVo