Robert Pollard
pulled the plug on
Guided by Voices
in 2004, but by that point many fans won over by the band ten years earlier had long stopped paying attention. And who could blame them? Sometime around 1999, just when
GBV
leapfrogged from
Matador
to
TVT
and made their second attempt at a big
rock
record,
Pollard
's solo albums started piling up at an alarmingly rapid rate, along with box sets of
outtakes presented under invented band names. Sure, the solo records, billed as part of the never-ending Fading Captain series, were intended to be a clearing-house for experimental material that couldn't quite fit on the increasingly streamlined
albums, but the sheer avalanche of material wound up seeming like little more than white noise to those unwilling to devote nearly all their free time to sorting out the minutia within
's vast, cumbersome discography. It also didn't help that despite all this music, it didn't seem that
was taking great leaps forward: instead, he was refining and sharpening the blueprint introduced to the world at large with 1994's
Bee Thousand
, the record that saw him catapult out of Dayton, OH, and into the realm of cult legend.
Legendary status suited
well, but his ceaseless productivity diminished his status, pushing him to the fringes of the fringes of
indie rock
. He could have existed there forever, but he wanted to break out of the band -- or at least, he wanted to jump-start his career, to bring disenchanted listeners back into the fold by breaking up the band and giving his career a fresh start. And so,
From a Compound Eye
, roughly his eighth solo album, but the first that was consciously intended for a wider audience. Although it was released in January 2006, the album had been completed for a long time, since the waning days of
, and saved until 2006, when an appropriate amount of breathing time had passed between the band's demise and the launch of a solo career -- enough time to make those listeners who had long ago given up on the band interested again, with the solo album, band biography, and DVD of the final concert all hitting the stores within a month of each other. For the hardcore, the fact that this album was designed as
's first ever, long-awaited genuine double album -- constructed and sequenced as if its 26 songs were spread over four vinyl sides -- was supposed to be the selling point, along with its heavily hyped pre-release buzz on the Internet (as well as
Jim Greer
's official biography).
So does
live up to its multiple promises? Yes, to a degree. For those who abandoned
around
Mag Earwhig!
or
Do the Collapse
and thereby missed the band's latter-day renaissance upon their return to
, this is a good reintroduction to the world of
. It's comfortably familiar, equal parts affected British psychedelia and
British Invasion
hooks, with his
prog rock
heart pierced by his enduring affection for
Wire
-patterned weirdness and blasts of
Who
-styled rockers.
's songwriting is more focused, and producer
Todd Tobias
-- a former
keyboardist who also helmed
Bob
's 2004
Fiction Man
the way he did this, by overdubbing all the instruments himself after
laid down his guitar and vocals -- fills out the sound, giving this a rich, fully realized sound, not only in comparison to
's
lo-fi
records, but also to their muscular latter-day affairs. That said, at its core
ain't all that different than the seemingly thousands of other
-related projects -- it's still a rush of songs heavy on hooks but not coherence, interesting sounds that never quite seem to lead anywhere, enigmatic lyrics that never quite withstand scrutiny. On the surface it sounds great, yet it leaves little behind. And, once again,
's dogged determination to push himself to the limits of self-indulgence means he winds up with too much of a not-bad thing. By the end of
, his circular melodies and swirling songs are a bit exhausting, and the ballyhooed double-album sequencing doesn't have any discernible benefit to the album itself: in terms of time, it may run longer than any other
album, but
Alien Lanes
is two songs longer than this, and
's fractured style and never-ending stream of songs always make his records feel like double albums, even when they clock in at 40 minutes.
All this means that
winds up standing apart from the pack of
projects even if it doesn't stand that far apart. It sprawls, but most individual tracks are full and focused, taking his art-
pop
to grand, cinematic scale, even if it plays more like a collection of short films than an epic picture. For those who have stuck with
through his ups and downs and piles of CDs, they'll be more inclined to find the connecting line between these tunes, particularly since it does serve up a fair amount of great
songs (such as
"Dancing Girls and Dancing Men,"
"Love Is Stronger Than Witchcraft,"
and
"Lightshow"
) along with more sonic detail to get lost in than any of his previous albums. And those are all good reasons for those who have gotten off the train to use
as a reintroduction to his work, but for as good as this is in long stretches and small doses, it ultimately suffers from the
curse: too much
in miniature winds up sounding like minutia. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine