#16 The Hallway Of Shatter-Proof Glass 18 tracks, 45 minutes my favourite demos & alternate versions from Suitcase. These all appeared on VOT, Propeller, B000, Alien Lanes, and UTBUTS. 01 - Quality Of Armour 02 - Up We Go (aka Crocker's Favourite Song) 03 - Less Active Railroad (aka Wished I Was a Giant) 04 - Expecting Brainchild 05 - Wondering Boy Poet 06 - Clean It Up (aka Tractor Rape Chain) 07 - Hallway Of Shatter-Proof Glass (aka Goldheart....) 08 - Smothered In Hugs 09 - All Fall Down (aka Echoes Myron) 10 - Good To Look (aka Queen Of Cans and Jars) 11 - Sleeper (aka Peep-Hole) 12 - Coastal Town (aka Closer You Are) 13 - Motor Away 14 - Atom Eyes (Sprite Version) 15 - One Drop (aka Office Of Hearts) 16 - Dancing With the Answers (aka Big Boring Wedding) 17 - Delayed Reaction Brats 18 - Try Me On For Size (aka Echoes Myron [again!]) I think #14 is from a rarity comp. I forget. Yes, #17 is not from any of the studio albums, but it fits chronologically and I LOVE this version. A few more coming later...
Wow, incredible mixes there. I have nowhere near as much GBV as some people, and I have over 70 Pollard releases. Holy cow! So much for playing a disc of Suitcase 1 a day, I've played through the whole thing today. My brain is fried, but I found 45 songs worth salvaging !
#17 The Happy Sounds Of The Crowd (EP) 8 tracks, 19 minutes The Crowd was a Pollard band from the early 80's. These are all the Crowd songs from Suitcase 01 - Murphy Had a Birthday 02 - Eloise 03 - Time Will Destroy You 04 - Then Again 05 - Linda's Lottery 06 - Thick and Thin 07 - Disappearing Act 08 - Little Jimmy the Giant (full band version)
#18 Pissing In the Canal (EP) 7 tracks, 20 minutes all the songs from this aborted cassette release from 1984 01 - Angry Pillows (Gone Away) 02 - Lockets Of the Empress 03 - Walls and Windows 04 - Echoland 05 - Before My Eyes 06 - Together Apart 07 - Amnesia More info on this mythical album here: GBVDB - Guided By Voices Database 1 or 2 of these are not on Suitcase and can only be found via internet sleuthing
#19 Bellboy Stomp 15 tracks, 33 minutes these are all great demos and alternate versions of random Bob songs post-Mag Earwhig!, so good that I had to collect them onto this hodgepodge. I believe all of them are on Suitcase. 01 - Rocket Head (aka Teenage FBI) 02 - Bellboy Stomp (aka He Rises! Our Union Bellboy) 03 - Mannequin's Complaint 04 - It Is Divine 05 - She It (aka I'll Take the Cure) 06 - White Skin and Bones (aka Zoom) 07 - Only Ghost In Town (aka Coat Factory Zero) 08 - She Don't Know Your Name (aka Be It Not For the Serpentine Rain Dodger) 09 - Late Night Scamerica 10 - Wrinkled Ghost 11 - Glad Girls 12 - You Make the Sun (aka The Town That's After Me) 13 - Speak Like Men 14 - Paper Girl 15 - Huffman Prairie Flying Field
#20 Fall Like Magic 16 tracks, 34 minutes my favourite ballad-y tracks from 1989-ish, with a few oddballs thrown in to add some more Bob flavour 01 - Time Machines 02 - Mother & Son 03 - Two Or Three Songs 04 - Do Be 05 - Ruth 06 - Roving Reporter 07 - United 08 - The Terrible Two 09 - Best Things Goin' Round 10 - Call Me 11 - Something's Missing 12 - 7 Strokes To Heaven's Edge 13 - Trying To Make It Work Again 14 - I'm Cold 15 - Solid Gold Animal Collection 16 - Class Clown Spots a UFO Roving Reporter is unreleased I'm Cold is such a damn beautiful song. Chokes me up every time A couple tracks are from the Delicious Pie comp, not from Suitcase
Show's over folks! That's all the 'homemade albums' I got. I look forward to following this thread and reading all your thoughts on GBV.
Really liking this one, even though I only have half the tracks (the ones on Demons & Painkillers from Hardcore UFO box). Still need Glad Girls & Jill Hives singles, then I will have to do some hunting to get the others. Disc 2 of UFO's is so good. Absolutely love the I Am a Tree b-sides (Chase, Flame, Grogshop), and the alternate Now To War & Choking Tara, they are my favourite versions. Then we get the great Ironmen b-sides, Finks, My Thoughts Are a Gas, Postal Blowfish, Tigerbomb & Plantations EPs, a couple of superb live tracks and yet more random stuff. What a disc.
One thing On the 2012-2014 'classic' reunion era. . . It would be cool if they put all the 7" b-sides together and released it on CD. I've only just realised how many singles they put out during this time. A while back I somehow managed to get a copy of the promo CD 'Glue On Bicycle' which contains the 7 x 2013 b-sides from English Little League. I got lucky on eBay as I haven't seen a copy for sale since and when it came up in the search, I didn't even know it existed. Must be quite rare. I like Tobin's songs in particular on that disc. Its a shame they didn't do it for the 2012 & 2014 b-sides. It seems most of these singles are on iTunes anyway. Suppose I should buy them whilst they're still there. Would just be nice to have these all on one release. Especially as they did it for the 2013 stuff. Who knows, there might even be some good songs amongst them!
Man I can't wait to set up some playlists with these tracks. This makes wading through the Suitcases so much more manageable.
got Zepellin Over China yesterday from my local store. First Listen : excellent and seems back to kind of "hi fi "production of the TVT years or close which is fine with me
The last few have been generally like that, maybe not so much for Please Be Honest. Strange to credit that as GBV as Bob played all the instruments. When I’ve spun ZOC a few more times I’d like to make a killer playlist from the last few albums
I had a hard time with the fact it's a GBV album. I thought it was a ploy by Pollard since he's said he is GBV. The thing is he's right to a certain extent. I wasn't going to buy any new GBV albums after that but six months later I bought it and it took a while (as usual) to get into but (as usual) I did. I only buy GBV albums and nothing more.
I've let ZOC sink in over the last couple weeks, and overall I think it's a solid album. I'll be honest that I'm a little let down after Space Gun, which IMO was a consistently good-to-great album from front to back, and maybe even a top 5 GBV album for me. I think the standard Pollard criticism of "why doesn't he just release ONE good album per year with his best songs from that year?!" could be modified a little bit for ZOC. I think if this was whittled down to its best 16-18 tracks, it'd be one of Bob's better albums. There are a handful of tracks that don't go much of anywhere, although I'm sure other people here would include totally different songs in that list than I would. I really dig all of the singles, as well as Your Lights Are Out, Einstein's Angel, Jam Warsong, The Hearing Department, among many others. And the band sounds GREAT. This might be my favorite sounding GBV album as far as the overall band performance is concerned. My biggest issue with the album is one that I rarely ever with Bob: The vocal performance on ZOC is very inconsistent. I honestly lost count of the number off-pitch or strained notes, and they really distracted me. I noticed this pop up on Space Gun once or twice, such as the beginning part of Liar's Box, but it's much more frequent on ZOC. He sounds great on some tracks though, particularly when his vocals are double-tracked and/or supported with harmonies. It seems like another take or two on some of these cuts would have been beneficial.
This is actually my primary problem with post-1996 Bob. I remember when the two Merge albums came out ("Coast to Coast..." and "Standard Gargoyle...") thinking "Man, the vocals are REALLY rough in spots." I think Bob has come to the place where he's obviously OK with this, which I think is unfortunate. I also think it's a combination of his voice aging and a bad habit of not really having a vocal melody nailed down before recording...
I'm pretty sure this was the intention. That and Bob realizes that he can sell way more copies of an album simply by branding it as Guided By Voices. Notice there hasn't been any solo albums released in the past few years and the side projects have been minimal as well.
I'll agree with this. But I think some of it is by design. Bob has been writing more and more "post-punk/art rock" sounding songs lately and I think the off-kilter vocals kind of fit the bill for those numbers in his mind.
