Guided by Voices - Strut of Kings (2024)

 

Indie Rock / Power Pop / Progressive Rock

RIYL: Pavement, Built to Spill, Beat Happening

★★★½

Absurdly prolific Robert Pollard's Guided by Voices project is another of those that's difficult to follow due to the sheer number of albums released per year (averaging 2-3 when active) and since there have been maybe 25 or 30 records from various incarnations since the rotating group's original heyday in the mid-90s it would be easy to dismiss them all in favor of a band with a more deliberate and intentional songwriting pace. Strut of Kings, their 39th proper album, demonstrates the error in this logic, though, and proves that increased quantity doesn't have to mean diminished quality.

The sole GBV record slated for 2024, in some ways it feels like more of a statement than the rest, especially since it plays like a culmination of Pollard's experimentation with the bite-sized prog-rock structures of the three records that preceded it in 2023. For those of us who grew up on the direct-to-cassette lo-fi sound the group pioneered in Pollard's basement during their most revered period, the proper recording techniques and polished studio production at first sound a bit out of place when paired with his still-surreal, cryptic and fantastical sonic imagery. After a warming period, though, they actually come to serve Kings' medieval rock opera persona well as the added orchestral flourishes soundtrack epic political drama while the warm acoustic plucking in the simpler passages evokes sympathy for the lowly courtroom jester.

Fans of tape hiss need not worry, though, since Pollard's voice still sounds both close up and reverberated as if he's singing directly into a recorder, lending him a sense of otherworldly omnipresence as he guides us through the tightly-wound labyrinthine structures across the record's eleven tracks. As always for Guided by Voices, despite their brevity they're anything but straightforward, rewarding repeated listens as they lay down a line of familiar thread, both as a path through this album's regal estate and as a taut connection to the band's legendary past.