The Hall of Fantastically Fine Things

  Introduction This is the first of the albums that I only listened to properly following my Damascene conversion at the beginning of this year, having by this point in the GBV choronology fully abandoned the 'album a day' Facebook group that I've referred to in previous posts. The Album Let's Go! I said in my previous post that  Aerial Nostalgia  represented 'the first time that "lo-fi-ness" starts to sound as if it's a deliberate part of the aesthetic' and this approach seems to be firmly embedded with this LP. There's a rough, ragged, '4-track demo recorded in the garage' feel to nearly all of it.  Opener 'Airshow 88' sets the tone: after a 'flick through the channels' introduction à la 'Wish You Were Here' , it erupts - after a rallying 'Let's go!' - into a squalling, furious mess of serrated riffing and desperately angry vocals that are discomfortingly tuneless. Whilst the vocals are not quite...

  Introduction The third GBV album marked the ( in retrospect,  disappointingly early) point at which I bailed out of the 'album a week' Facebook group I was briefly involved with during lockdown. I do have a few notes from the time, but this one is more fully written from a post- conversion point of view... The Album Part of the strategy.... To the casual listener, GBV are best known for their  prolificacy, Fall-like myriad of line-up changes and, as their Wikipedia page puts it, ' lo-fi aesthetic'. The last of these characteristics is the interesting aspect here: whilst neither Devil nor Sandbox sounded as if they had more than a minimal recording budget, this is the first time that 'lo-fi-ness' starts to sound as if it's a deliberate part of the aesthetic. There's a sense here that the distortion, fuzziness and hiss are part of a strategy rather than being the result of of material restrictions. 'Slopes Of Big Ugly' , for example, is frame...

  Introduction Before I start, a note of thanks to the good folk of the Guided By Voices Facebook group, who gave a very warm and positive reaction to my  first album review . As I said in that post, it's a little daunting to be sharing your thoughts with such a well-established community, so I'm very grateful for the positive comments. As I mentioned in the previous post, Devil Between My Toes and Sandbox were the only two albums that I knew well before I embarked on this project, due to my short-lived participation in a lockdown 'album a week' Facebook group... The Album ...and when I first listened to  Sandbox , I was immediately struck by how consistent an album it is in comparison  to   Devil , in terms of overall sound and approach; it's also notably more accessible . Although the Chronic Town -era REM influence is still present here and there, it isn't quite so prevalent. Some of the Pete Buck-style arpeggios are replaced by chunkier riffs and the drumm...

Introduction When I started this journey at the beginning of 2024, this was one of only two GBV albums that I knew well back-to-front well. This was because - as I mentioned in the introduction - during lockdown I joined a Facebook 'album-a-week' group, but only managed to keep up for a fortnight.  As I also mentioned in the first post, I'm deliberately avoiding the kind of research that I did for my You Must Get The All  Fall blog in order to keep this as a personal reaction kind of thing. So, for example, I have no idea as to why the cover is dominated by a blurry chicken. The Album Climbing trees, exploring the woods The first important thing to note is that this album contains a trio of brilliant, irrepressibly catchy pop songs, although each achieves this status in a slightly different way. (For future reference, it may be worth pointing out that I don't mean anything disparaging by the word 'pop': the term has a multitude of meanings, but I tend to use i...