In an age of growing U.S-scepticism in Britain, in part due to the re-election of Donald Trump and its expected continued export of individualistic ideals and unphilosophical moral nihilism to the world, Guided by Voices are the band whose music and mythos is a safe haven and preserve for struggling romanticizers of ‘America’. So, when you learn that GBV’s first album of 2025 (likely the first of three or four), is on its way, you take a sigh of relief that the Land of Liberty still has its heroes.
The backdrop of Guided by Voices is one of blue-collar towns (in their case Dayton, Ohio), which informed leader Bob Pollard’s songwriting and the band’s image as guys with day-jobs, writing and recording weird power pop songs on Tascam 4 tracks and drinking endless amounts of beer in the evenings, which in truth, is what they were doing. A lack of pretension and pseudo-intellectualism, despite art-schooled influences (Wire, early Pink Floyd, any prog-rock) and (very) low fidelity production was a big part of their appeal when cult career high Bee Thousand, their 7th album, was released, and this has continued to this day. Think of them as America’s The Fall, but with much more melody. GBV are the preserve for said romanticizers because of the image they uphold of being the epitome of everything good about America. Catchy rock music made by hard-working, Miller Lite drinking, baseball playing, no-nonsense power poppers. It may sound like a working-class stereotype created by the middle-class rock press, or something constructed in contrivance themselves, but this really is the truth of GBV’s world and ways. In fact, only after Alien Lanes (10 years after the band formed) came out did Pollard quit his job as elementary school teacher and Mitch Mitchell as a truck driver. The radio has Bruce Springsteen; the underground has Guided by Voices.
The 1996 film by Banks Tarver, Watch Me Jumpstart, is the ultimate picture of Dayton and the people and places GBV were shaped by. This still below perfectly captures the atmosphere and essence of suburban American life, inherent to the group’s DNA. In fact, if you read this as a stranger to the world of Guided by Voices, I implore you first crack open a can of beer, listen to Bee Thousand in full, watch the short film on YouTube, and then come back to Universe Room and read the rest of this review.
So, how far could we imagine a band has progressed by their 42nd album? You would think they may be making Swedish jazz odysseys, or some yet undefinable genre people speculate John Lennon may have been playing forty-two records down the line. Yet, Guided by Voices haven’t progressed by extraordinary amounts, but that just isn’t their prerogative.
Still based in Dayton, Bob and company, who is at this moment, Doug Gillard (recently been placed in Rolling Stones’ top 250 guitarists list), Kevin March, Mark Shue and Bobby Bare Jr, have produced at its best, an enjoyable, and although not ground-breaking, an experimental work too. Universe Room is not yet poignant considering it releases as one of the first records out in the first couple of months of Trump’s second term as President, but time will tell as the songs live and breathe in tandem with America’s struggle.
This record is a continuation of a theme of the post-pandemic GBV albums, where the songwriting is more so explorations of Pollard’s age-old love for 70s prog, rather than 60s psych-pop and 70s rock. Although the single ‘Dawn Believes’ has its influence firmly in the writing of Damn the Torpedoes-era Tom Petty. If completed with drums (which are missing frequently on this record), the track would be another can-crushing, high kicking power pop song in the GBV songbook. It’s even finished off with Pollard’s typical Barrett-esque lyrical absurdism, “I now pronounce you pie and crust”. But this time round, Pollard doesn’t want to make it that easy.
Rather than hooks and choruses throughout, the album works as a collage of sections and ideas, leaving traditional song structure behind. By and large, if you want to hear a good riff or vocal melody again, you’ll have to replay the song, rather than wait for it to come back around in the next ‘verse’ or ‘chorus’ simply because these structures haven’t been written into Universe Room. In the band’s press release for the album, it is explained that ‘barely any song segments are revisited’ and ‘typical choruses are a thing of the past’, so we don’t have to worry that Pollard has lost his gift for great choruses and hooks. The fact that he has to stop himself from writing more great choruses is a gift in and of itself and only further confirms his ‘genius’.
Writing meandering segments that don’t return is a departure from the band’s usual pop structuring, yet it retains their characteristic tendency to keep the songs on the shorter side, demonstrating impressive ability to create prog-pastiches without 10-minute run times (try ‘19th Man To Fly An Airplane’). Since Bob wants us to revisit this album over and over to experience the album in different ways, he’s made it very easy, by keeping the album so palatable, despite being 37 minutes (generally the average length for an LP). The album isn’t a slog to get through, due to the fact the songs are so short, and if there’s a section you aren’t too fond on, it’s over within 20 seconds. This contrasts with the uncharacteristic single effort of last year, Strut of Kings, which consisted of more conventionally measured tracks, averaging 3 minutes.
Alongside a shift from writing style, there is a noticeable change with the production style on Universe Room. In the press release, it continues that ‘fidelity daringly shifts between lo-fi and hi-fi’, which is evident from song to song, and even within the songs themselves, where the styles are merged.
Their first foray into high-fidelity recording came in 1999 with the Ric Ocasek (The Cars) produced Do the Collapse, which polarized and angered many hardcore GBV purists. This has continued as proxy production for GBV through the past 25 years, but Universe Room is a welcome return to lo-fi and an interesting experiment in piecing these two worlds together.
The track listing has been put together so to emphasise this mix of production style, evident from the run of the hi-fi post-punk influenced ‘Fly Religion’ to the cassette tape recorded duff guitar demo ‘The Well Known Soldier’ finishing with the shortest track, ‘Hers Purple’, which uses hi-fi recording techniques on the band but lo-fi on the vocals. Even within the hi-fi tracks, there is a constant underscoring of the hum of amps and old technology that is audible throughout the whole work. This, I think, solidifies the album as more of an experiment of atmosphere than pop record.
Universe Room isn’t the perfect album, but it doesn’t want to be, nor does it need to be. Famously, ‘perfect’ will never been in the Guided by Voices paradigm. Why else would their most powerful works be ones that have technical faults and wonderfully painful guitar tones? ‘Perfect’ is unimportant and not why we enjoy outsider music. As per usual, within the American sand of Universe Room, there are golden nuggets of wonderful weirdo-pop joy. Long may Guided by Voices continue to do whatever they want to do for as long as America breathes.
Universe Room is out now on GBV Inc Records – order, download or stream your copy in all the usual places here
Guided by Voices: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Review by Tom Grogan
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