Keeping on top of the full range of Robert Pollard’s seeming millions of solo albums and official Guided By Voices work is, frankly, more work than anyone should have to put in. It’s far too late, we suspect, to hope that he’ll hook up with a producer who can make him focus on quality over quantity and shoot for a dozen polished songs instead of two dozen songs that share four dozen half-formed great ideas. But that just isn’t what GBV is about-there have always been diamonds in the rockpile, but you have to be willing to mine them yourself. Their latest disc, August’s Earthquake Glue, is no exception-gifted, surreal lyric imagery and crunchy, powerful rawk that works brilliantly about fifty percent of the time. Pollard’s catalog of tunes is just crying out for a really well-done best-of compilation, and this month sees a pretty good, if not perfect, attempt. Two of them, really-there’s the single disc Human Amusements at Hourly Rates, and a slightly different version on the box set Hardcore UFOs, the rest of which, five discs of rarities and live stuff, only contributes to the GBV sprawl problem.
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