Hoop dreams

GbV team up with Cobra Verde

by Brett Milano

No matter how many times you play their tapes in the car, your favorite cult bands always sound a little different when you finally hear them on the radio. I heard Guided by Voices on commercial radio for the first time last week, when one local station sandwiched them between Foo Fighters and Tori Amos. The surprise was that when you stick GbV's single "Bulldog Skin" on the airwaves, it doesn't sound eccentric or lo-fi: it sounds just like alternative rock, with a vocal and guitar that could belong to any number of post-Nirvana outfits. What distinguishes it as a GbV effort, aside from the song's being so damn good, are a few telltale signs of life: the gung-ho guitar solo; the whoo-hoos in the chorus, and the sense that someone in the studio -- probably GbV singer/ringleader Robert Pollard -- was having one hell of a good time.

That, after all, is what a lot of people love about Guided by Voices -- the notion that they're a bunch of beer-drinking, music-geek lowlifes, complete with 40ish frontman, who've struck a blow for beer-drinking, music-geek lowlifes everywhere by also being a great band. No argument there. But it would also be a mistake to suggest that GbV, who come to the Met Cafe this Monday, don't want to be on the radio, and the new Mag Earwhig! (Matador) is the proof. If the last GbV album, Under the Bushes Under the Stars, moved away from lo-fi, this one buries it for good.

That's not the only change for the band. In a coup that doesn't seem to have been completely bloodless, everybody but Pollard left last year and was replaced by the members of Cobra Verde, who make their GbV debut on the album and current tour (the old bandmembers are also featured on some tracks). Cobra Verde seem an obvious choice. Hatched from the remains of Death of Samantha three years ago, they've come damn close to heavy metal and even closer to the post-industrial panic that's been required of hip Cleveland bands since Pere Ubu started. (They even cover Ubu's "Chinese Radiation" on the disc.)

The surprise about Cobra Verde's new odds-and-ends compilation, Egomania (Love Songs) (Scat), is how sprightly it sounds, and not just on the three token pop songs. Even the mock-blues "For My Woman" comes off as if they'd forgotten not to enjoy themselves. In what may be the most telling sign of Cobra Verde's pop inclinations, their cover of the Association's "Never My Love" seems more heartfelt than their take on the Ubu tune.

What CV bring to GbV is, in a word, volume. Hearing them play a couple of stray oldies at a recent show, I thought the entire band had been remastered for CD. Beyond that, GbV haven't changed much, offering proof that the magic was always in Pollard's songwriting, not the intentionally crappy four-track sound.

Pollard, for his part, is as prolific as ever. Recently, he related over the phone from his home in Dayton, he reeled off the titles of a couple dozen new GbV songs that didn't really exist to a fanzine writer. "They came around later with the titles and I said, `Hey, these are great -- I've got to write these songs.' Now I've got 23 songs for the next album; and that's what makes them so good -- they were all written in a day, so they sound really cohesive. Songwriting for me is something that just happens, it's like going into a trance. If I have enough cool titles I can write them."

Pollard's prodigious songwriting habits have become the stuff of legend. It was reported last year that GbV were making a 100-song triple album. Not true, he says, though it might have happened if the band were still recording on four-track ("We wanted to make it real conceptual and put 33-1/3 songs on each disc"). Another rumor is that Pollard has a suitcase, with tapes of more than a thousand unreleased songs, that he plans to give to a random fan when the right moment strikes.

"There is a suitcase," he confirms. "There are thousands of songs, and a lot of them are really bad. In fact, some guys are coming over to play basketball tonight -- this kid I know, one who used to follow us around all the time and get on my nerves, who I became friends with. Me and my son and my brother are going to play his guys at basketball. The deal is that if we win, they're giving us a jukebox; but if they win, they get the suitcase."

It must be hard to imagine parting with that much work over a basketball game.

"Yeah, but these guys will never beat us. I've seen the way they play."

Guided by Voices headline the Met Cafe with Superconductor opening this Monday, July 14.