You’d think the hardest part about ranking your 500 favorite Robert Pollard/Guided By Voices songs would be finding 500 songs you really love. On the contrary. This is Bob Pollard we’re talking about. The hardest thing was limiting the list to 500 tracks.
After penning a review of 2018’s Space Gun and compiling a well-received (sarcasm) ranking of Guided By Voices’ 25 LPs up to that point I half-seriously told MAGNET’s editor that I was retiring from writing about the band and its genius auteur Robert Pollard. (I did end up doing a blurb about the then-upcoming Warp And Woof a few months later.) It wasn’t that I’d stopped listening to and/or caring about Pollard’s songs; rather, serving as the rag’s go-to GBV product tester had gotten stale and not just for readers. Apart from, “Man, this guy’s so good,” I’d run out of things to say.
Release Day Picks profiles this week highlight new albums by Blur, Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, Andrew Bird, Greta Van Fleet, Guided By Voices and Nils Lofgren.