In what, for me, seemed an incredibly defiant gesture at the time, I ordered Mag Earwhig! A year later, my new favorite band put out a new album. Do the Collapse was host to a few great tracks, but the cheesier moments sprinkled liberally over Robert Pollard's songs proved tremendously disheartening.
For the first time, I took to reading reviews of Guided by Voices' records, each one fortifying my belief that the quality of their output had been spiraling downward since the glory days of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes.
Over the course of Guided by Voices' next few albums, my excitement began to wane, and by the time Earthquake Glue was released this year, I had all but lost interest in Guided by Voices.
Up until recently, I'd never have thought that a one of these collections could rekindle my interest in a long-neglected band-- it's just hard to shake the feeling that enjoying a best-of album is like beating a video game with all the cheat codes on. But listening to Human Amusements at Hourly Rates , it becomes immediately clear that Guided by Voices' vast and uneven catalog is perfectly suited for this treatment.
Over the course of fifteen records, two going on three box sets, and countless singles and EPs, Robert Pollard has written more than enough brilliant songs to carry five of these things.
But those great songs have always been broken up by weaker tracks on GBV full-lengths, putting a damper on the momentum that could be generated by an uninterrupted sequence of near-perfect rock tracks. On Human Amusements , this unadulterated flow of excellence is fully realized, and the results are absolutely glorious. Best-of records are frequently criticized for robbing songs of the context created by their respective albums, but Human Amusements succeeds largely for this very reason, collecting material from the most seemingly disparate eras of Guided by Voices' output, and reconstructing them into a surprisingly cohesive whole.
To Remake the Young Flyer. Tobin Sprout. Glad Girls. Drinker's Peace. Surgical Focus. Cut-Out Witch. The Best of Jill Hives. Hot Freaks. Shocker in Gloomtown. Chasing Heather Crazy. My Valuable Hunting Knife. The Official Ironmen Rally Song. Motor Away.
Teenage FBI. Watch Me Jumpstart. Exit Flagger. Back to the Lake. I Am a Scientist. Release Date November 4, Guys Night Out Imagination Drinking. Guided by Voices.
Spotify Amazon. Everywhere with Helicopter Robert Pollard. I Am a Tree Doug Gillard. My Kind of Soldier Robert Pollard. Twilight Campfighter Robert Pollard. Echos Myron Robert Pollard. Learning to Hunt Robert Pollard. Friday, May 1, Push the Limits. Chris Strompolos, Jayson Lamb and Eric Zala, three friends who first met on the long bus journey to school in Mississippi, were just eleven when Spielberg's film came out but there was no doubt about the effect that it would have on them.
Indeed, it was probably their youthful exeuberance and, some would say, naivite, that enabled them to overcome the small hurdles of absolutely no budget and no filmmaking exerience to persevere with a project which would end up taking seven long years to complete.
Substituting money for imagination and sometimes pure chuztpah most of the scenes in the film were shot in and around Mississippi, enlisting the help of most of the local youth as stand-ins and extras for the crowd scenes. For example, the Cairo street scene was filmed in the Gulfport business district where the trio were almost arrested after a local businessman assumed they were making a porn movie.
Interior scenes were shot at the boys' homes, usually without parental consent. These included a faithful replica of the Well of Souls aswell as the burning bar scene hilariously, in one of the out-takes, a pre-teen is seen studying the instructions on one of the fire extinguishers as flames spread through the basement of Eric's house Given the financial and technological constraints of the film don't expect it to look all that slick; shot on a Betamax camera, the visuals are shaky and grainy and the audio track sometimes in audible but despite this, and maybe because of it, the love for the source material always comes through.
Fast forward to , and through a six degrees of separation type happenstance, the film made its way into the hands of producer and director Eli Roth who then made two of the most influential decisions he could have: first he gave a copy to Harry Knowles of Ain't it Cool fame and second, he gave a copy to Stephen Spielberg himself.
Bearing in mind the complete and flagrant disregard for copyright that the film demonstrates including its illicit recording at the cinema in the first place , it would not have been surprising if Spielberg's response would have been to slap a law suite on the trio. Instead, he wrote them all letters describing the film as the nicest compliment he and George Lucas had ever received and invited the trio to meet him. In an ironic twist of fate with a particularly American flavour, the producer Scott Rudin bought the life rights of all three filmmakers in with a view to making a film of their lives.
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