This song begins with a snippet from the song “Broadcastor House” from Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer, that finds Robert Pollard singing “Broadcastor House, I wanna blow, all stand back and give me room.” Then, a hi-fi slab of guitar kicks in and the real song begins. Isolation Drills at one time was to [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Isolation Drills category.
Pivotal Film
It isn’t often that a Guided by Voices song can pop up on the iPod’s shuffle and I won’t instantly know who it is. I might not instantly recall the title or album, but I’ll know it is GBV. That isn’t the case with “Pivotal Film.” It came up this morning, and I thought it [...]
Privately
As much as Robert Pollard clearly puts into sequencing his albums, I’ve rarely had the sense that he worries much about the songs that close those albums. Isolation Drills and Half Smiles of the Decomposed being the exceptions. “Privately,” which brings Isolation Drills to an end, feels like a closer. It’s a mid-tempo track with [...]
Chasing Heather Crazy
By the time of Isolation Drills, Guided by Voices had a formula of sorts. Doug Gillard starts with an interesting guitar figure, Robert Pollard follows with his vocal and then the rest of the band kicks in when the first major hook makes its bow. It subverts that formula at nearly every opportunity, of course, [...]
Unspirited
Robert Pollard’s vocals approximate a round on “Unspirited,” the singer singing one line, and then, on a second take, starting the second just before the first wraps up. It’s an interesting approach, and one that draws more attention to the lyrics than might be otherwise. Do they hold up? Somewhat. Even when you’re lifted by [...]
How’s My Drinking?
If Robert Pollard has ever been more direct in a song than this, it certainly escaped me. He and his band were known as much for drinking as for making great music, and he clearly was taking a lot of heat on the home front for the former and receiving too little acclaim beyond it [...]
Glad Girls
“1, 2, 3, 4, tell the teacher what she wore.” With that sing-song jump-rope rhyme, Robert Pollard kicks off a gleefully drunken rendition of “Glad Girls” during a November 2004 show at the 40 Watt in Athens, Ga., part of Guided by Voices’ “Electrifying Conclusion” tour. The song, a ready-made hit if ever there was [...]
Fair Touching
Though Guided by Voices songs by and large aren’t terribly complex compositions, neither are they very straightforward. Robert Pollard usually does something with the structure — be it an odd strum pattern, a herky-jerky beat or an unexpected melody line — to make even the simplest song inherently interesting. “Fair Touching” is the rare exception, [...]