Guided by Voices
Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia
1989, Halo Records
Reissue (via the Box set): 1995, Scat Records
This is the first Guided by Voices record that sounds like Guided by Voices. It took ’em four tries, but they did it. This psych-pop treat from 1989 walks and talks exactly like the band that I’ve been stuck on for twenty-three years now.
Hey, it takes time to find yourself. Sometimes in life you think you’ve found yourself, but nope, it’s only some jerk-off who happens to look like you and has worse taste in clothes. There’s still more work to do. More trial and error in your future. More tearing down and rebuilding. It helps if there’s no one around telling you that you’re hot stuff all of the time. We all get big ideas about ourselves. Some of those ideas could stand to be kicked into the dirt. Being humbled makes you a better person and obscurity is the most fertile soil there is for creating something new.
I mean, how fucked are those bands who become huge stars on their first record? The whole world is now watching their next move. Their audience, the press, their record company, their creditors. They have to be self-conscious to the max in every cell in their bodies. They can’t just chill out and make Devil Between My Toes. The pressure almost always destroys them. Or they retire on a handful of hits. They fade away. Or they become one of those bands who puts out a new album once every nine years. Nostalgia acts.
They learn real quick that music is not an art, but a cold, cruel, boring business. And they never get over it.
Meanwhile, Robert Pollard never heard of such nonsense. Guided by Voices made six records over six years for an audience of nearly no one and, along the way, Pollard worked some bad ideas out his system and nurtured the habits of a real artist. An artist who creates all of the time, no matter what. An artist who’d still be doing it on some level even if we never came along and noticed. Guided by Voices used their obscurity wisely.
It’s not that the earlier albums are BAD, exactly. They’re full of good songs, but they don’t sound like a band who has a future. They’re the aural equivalent to a dated haircut. Some of them sound less like a vision being worked out and more like phases to be gotten over.
I’m trying to imagine an alternate world where Guided by Voices never became famous and their early records ended up circulating through used bins over the decades, unknown to most, $5 price stickers on the cover, snatched up by the odd record collector intrigued by the DIY cover art. (Also, what collector who has even a dim sense for what’s cool could turn down an 80s album called Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia that features songs titled “The Future is in Eggs”, “Short on Posters” and “Radio Show (Trust the Wizard)” and that thanks Byron Coley on the back?).
I can only speculate, but me, personally, I think I would have enjoyed Forever Since Breakfast and Sandbox, but wouldn’t have kicked up much dust to investigate the band further. The weirdness of Devil Between My Toes would have made me remember their name.
And I think that Self-Inflicted Aerial Nostalgia would have put me on a mission to find out anything else that I possibly could about them. It’s weird and beautiful, with melodies everywhere. It’s the kind of record that you play all night. It’s the good shit.
It’s an album full of personality. They’re small town guys. You can somehow just tell. There’s a certain yearning, a kind of air around the notes and chords and verses that you just don’t get from New Yorkers, Chicagoans or Los Angeles types. These guys have shoveled snow out of the driveway on their way to work. They’ve never played before jaded faces in a cool big city rock club. They wear clothes from Sears. You can hear it.
At the time, maybe the band saw this as their Revolver. It thrives on contrasts and diversity. Pop songs lead into noisy songs, which lead into soft songs and then rocking songs. Ballads sit pretty next to anthems. The wistful, acoustic pure melody-spinning of “Paper Girl” as it segues into the roaring “Navigating Flood Regions” (a song that got played live fifteen years later on the band’s “Electrifying Conclusion” tour) is beautiful stuff.
I’m also a slobbering fan for the feel of the chirping pop of “Short on Posters” (another song revived by the band live over a decade later) followed by the heavy riffing and hippie lyrics of “Chief Barrel Belly” and then the ragged voice-and-guitar gem of “Dying to Try This”.
I could go on and talk about lovely moonlight melody of “The Great Blake Street Canoe Race”, the skeletal beauty of “Liar’s Tale” and the crushing, stretched-out “An Earful O’ Wax”, perhaps the anthem of early Guided by Voices (“Hey man, what was that we said?/ I’m going deaf/ I chase widely the open spaces/ Built in my head”), but I won’t.
Albums are about the effect. The sum of the parts. And I don’t think that I ever, even as I race past the age of the band when they made this, will stop enjoying this record’s triumphant shout from the garage.