02 Sandbox

 

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 drumming is often more forceful and in a more traditional rock style.

Don't you screw it up...

Opener 'Lips Of Steel' is a case in point: driven by a crunchy, grinding riff, it's punctutated by energetic though never overly showy drum fills. 'A Visit To The Creep Doctor' is cut from the same cloth: similarly vibrant, its snaky guitar line and furious gallop, combined with a gloriously catchy vocal refrain ('don't you screw it up') make it a particular highlight. 'Can't Stop', although perhaps not quite as effective as the opening duo, has a similar energy. Framed around a choppy, bouncing riff, it also has a memorable hook ('make up your mind, baby') and is interspersed with understated arpeggio-led passages that once again recall REM, but, towards the end, also have a touch of Sonic Youth-style dissonance.

Another feature of 'Can't Stop', is the old school rock 'n' roll stylings of Pollard's vocal, emphaised by the heavy level of reverb with which the voice is treated. It's not the only example of this approach. The jaunty 'I Certainly Hope Not' sounds like a long-lost Buddy Holly number rediscovered by a teenage garage band. Although a little awkward in places, it has a certain winning charm. 

'Long Distance Man' has a similarly retro feel. Aiming, it would seem, for a mid-period Beatles vibe, it too is engagingly eager to please, although it sails a little close to being merely an obvious pastiche. There's also a spot of Beatles influence in 'Get To Know The Ropes', which has an Eastern raga-esque tone reminiscient of parts of Revolver (with some Velvet Underground-ish drone thrown in).

Although the influence is less pronounced here than on Devil, the most REM-like song here is the light and cheery 'Everyday'. It's somewhat more loose and ragged than anything you might find on Murmur or Reckoning, and certainly a great deal less earnest, but it's another song with an 'eager-to-please' attitude (exemplified, for example, in Pollard's occasionally strained vocal) that works hard to win you over. 

Generally the short interludes...

Other than the instrumentals and the intense 'Portrait Destroyed By Fire', Devil  largely stuck to relatively traditional song structures. This is also the case with most of Sandbox, although a couple of tracks do take a slightly less conventional approach. 'Barricade' involves several shifts in tempo and mood that - along with a running time of four and a half minutes that I'm already starting to realise is epic by GBV standards - give it an almost prog-like feel. It also features my favourite moment on the album: I'm a sucker for a well-placed and delivered guitar solo, and the one that emerges at 3:46 is delightfully uplifting.

'Common Rebels' also varies in its dynamics: it sets off with spasmodic vigour, slows into a meditative passage, then accelerates into a thunderously rousing denoument. There's a folkish / protest song vibe to it, and this is also the case with 'The Drinking Jim Crow', which stamps along stridently and somewhat malevolently..

One of the things about the GBV oeuvre that I initially found quite challenging to get to grips with was the brevity of many of the songs. Having spent a large chunk of my life listening to psych-rock, prog, post-rock, etc. - where tracks that clocked in under five minutes were generally the short interludes - I was, in my intitial 'big playlist phase', a little bemused and frustrated by the sheer volume of songs that popped up and then vanished within a hundred seconds or so. Consequently, my first reaction to 'Trap Soul Door' was *consults notes* 'a vaguely interesting idea that feels unfinished.' However, I have had, as Paddy Considine put it, 'my head changed profoundly' regarding this aspect. There'll be more on this subject in subsequent posts, but for now, I'll just say that 'TSD' - although perhaps a little slight - has a definite fragile beauty to it. The closing couplet ('Just one spark...') is genuinely moving.

For me, the strongest song on offer here is the final track, 'Adverse Wind'. A heady whirl of urgent melancholy punctuated by agressive drum fills, it rounds off the album perfectly.

Join me for a quick spin...

Overall, the lyrics on this album are much less abstract than was the case with Devil. For example, 'Can't Stop', 'Trap Soul Door' and 'I Certainly Hope Not' (I won't try to figure things out / it's complicated so when in doubt / I start crying / and stop trying') are pretty straightforward 'where did our relationship go wrong' kind of songs. 'Everyday' seems to be channeling Springsteen, with its 'brand new car with hideaway lights and a blue racing stripe' in which the narrator wishes to take his paramour on a 'quick spin'. 

Not everything is prosaic though. 'A Visit To The Creep Doctor', for example, contains the intriguing passage, 'The message was delivered / the mothers wept uncontrollably / mad children went to the warehouse / heaven's trumpets blow.' However, overall, Sandbox is perhaps a little lacking in the lyrical inventiveness of later albums.

In conclusion...

There's lots to love about Sandbox. It's a good-hearted and engaging album with plenty of strong melodies and hooks. It has a clearer focus than Devil; more of a sense of a definite 'sound' being honed. At least that's what I thought when I first listened to the album. From my current perspective (having now heard all the LPs up to and including English Little League) I know that Sandbox does not represent a definitive 'GBV sound' at all. But more on that later on...

The consistency of the album has both positive and negative connotations: there isn't a bad track on the album, but it doesn't have anything like the high points of Devil. And from my current 'up to 2013' perspective, I know that it's about to be eclipsed, repeatedly.

Added to the 'GBV Favourites' playlist: 

• Lips Of Steel
• A Visit To The Creep Doctor
• Barricade
• Adverse Wind

Album rank:

A note about this: I know that many people don't like scores, rankings, etc., and I totally understand that view. It's rather reductive to reduce any piece of art to a numerical score. So I can only apolgise to those who object and say to them that it's just how I operate; it's how I make sense of things.

And, should you be interested, the rating is an aggregate of the average score per song and an overall 'feel' mark for the album. 

1. 7.0 Sandbox 

2. 6.6 Devil Between My Toes 

Other News

I mentioned in the last post that I'd splashed out on a couple of GBV t-shirts. I was impressed with both how quickly they arrived and their quality. Here's me wearing one of them:

My mystery 'bonus GBV freebie' was indeed a bit of a mystery, as I had no idea what it was!

I now know that it's a 'beer sleeve' or 'koozie' - not something I'd ever come across before. It would seem that this is a US phenomenon, as we're not, over this side of the Atlantic, as wedded to the idea of beer having to be icy cold. Thanks again to the Facebook group for the enlightenment!

Thanks for reading: see you soon for my review of Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia.

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