Throw Your Javelin Through The Sun
01 Pantherz
02 Walls and Windows
03 Ergo Space Pig
04 Unabated Vicar of Scorched Earth
05 The Perfect Life
06 Shrine to the Dynamic Years
07 I Am Decided
08 14 Cheerleader Coldfront
09 I Am a Scientist
10 Scissors
11 Big Chief Chinese Restaurant
12 Mammoth Cave
13 Wandering Boy Poet
14 If We Wait
15 Look, It’s Baseball
16 Smothered in Hugs
17 Learning to Hunt
18 He’s the Uncle
19 In Previous Trials
20 Burning Flag Birthday Suit
21 The Official Ironmen Rally Song
22 Dusted
23 Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox
24 Supermarket the Moon
25 Why Did You Land?
26 Maxwell Jump
27 Damn Good Mr. Jam
28 Mincer Ray
29 Class Clown Spots a UFO
30 Striped White Jets
31 Ester’s Day
32 A Life in Finer Clothing
33 Gleemer (The Deeds of Fertile Jim)
34 Coastal Town
35 Ex-Supermodel
36 Red Gas Circle
37 The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory
38 Delayed Reaction Brats
39 Always Crush Me
40 The Key Losers
41 No Sky
42 Applehead
43 Don’t Stop Now
44 Heavy Metal Country
45 The Worryin’ Song
46 Catfood on the Earwig
47 Redmen and Their Wives
A few weeks ago, I tasked myself with making a mixtape that would serve as a celebration of—or, as the case may be, an introduction to—my favorite band, Guided by Voices. Their catalog being virtually endless (and, for the most part, consistently brilliant), I figured that compiling the mix would be the most daunting part of this process. As it turned out, though, selecting the songs was a fairly intuitive undertaking; what’s been far more difficult is articulating why this band is so important to me. The following 47 songs were culled from a variety of LPs, EPs, collections, and entire aborted releases—singer Bob Pollard once claimed he could write six songs on the toilet and three would be good, so there exists a wealth of unreleased material—but, to me, they all represent a cohesive canon: a surreal constellation of crude-oil seas and big chief Chinese restaurants, peopled by delayed reaction brats, unabated vicars, and ex-supermodels. If I’ve lost you, it’s because Pollard has a penchant for earnestly taking stream-of-consciousness gibberish and spinning it into bizarre, beautiful lo-fi landscapes that, against all reason, make a ton of sense. This mixtape is my attempt to represent Guided by Voices in a way that no written introduction could, so I’ll cut this short and simply invite you to check it out. Some listeners may find that they care even less than when the band blew up in the early ’90s. For others, though, this may be the beginning of what I’ve found to be an immersive and rewarding obsession.
*for information on specific songs/releases, refer to http://www.gbvdb.com/tracks.asp
By Daniel “Guided by Voices Enthusiast” Schurgin
twitter.com/danielschurgin