Vampire On Titus/Propeller

NME - 6 (out of 10) - "...[Guided By Voices] succeed in sustaining a mood (lazy, suburban) that is not always consistent but is often genuinely surprising..." Alternative Press - "...one of indie rock's best kept secrets....Like the superb Smog, GBV create a kind of never-neverland rock/pop out of beautiful, enigmatic fragments....Hearing their wondrous tuneage through a dense fog of amp static makes them sound so much more poignant than if they were produced with state-of-the-art equipment..." New York Times - "...lays out the full weird sprawl of the Guided By Voices experience..." Melody Maker - "...Guided By Voices are probably the last, great, undiscovered American underground band of the age....Each time you listen, you hear something new, left flummoxed that pop can still be invested with such poignancy..." Entertainment Weekly - "...a low-fi tour de force, featuring songs and fragments of such casual brilliance (R.E.M. and Pavement are the easiest stylistic reference points) that you know the majors will soon come sniffing...." - Rating: A+ New York Times (11/11/93, p.C24) - "...lays out the full weird sprawl of the Guided By Voices experience..." NME (11/19/94, p.47) - 6 (out of 10) - "...[Guided By Voices] succeed in sustaining a mood (lazy, suburban) that is not always consistent but is often genuinely surprising..." Melody Maker (10/30/93, p.34) - "...Guided By Voices are probably the last, great, undiscovered American underground band of the age....Each time you listen, you hear something new, left flummoxed that pop can still be invested with such poignancy..." Entertainment Weekly (12/24/93, p.60) - "...a low-fi tour de force, featuring songs and fragments of such casual brilliance (R.E.M. and Pavement are the easiest stylistic reference points) that you know the majors will soon come sniffing...." - Rating: A+ Alternative Press (11/93, p.63) - "...one of indie rock's best kept secrets....Like the superb Smog, GBV create a kind of never-neverland rock/pop out of beautiful, enigmatic fragments....Hearing their wondrous tuneage through a dense fog of amp static makes them sound so much more poignant than if they were produced with state-of-the-art equipment..."

VAMPIRE ON TITUS is Guided By Voices' first CD, following five albums and a 12-inch EP, all released on vinyl. Which is not to say these avatars of homemade, low-fidelity pop-rock have gone "digital"--TITUS was recorded on 4- and 8-track tape recorders, and sounds like it was mastered on an old boombox. Or as GBV's resident singer-songwriter-genius Robert Pollard puts it in the minute-long acoustic-guitar ditty "Wondering Boy Poet": "The cup is only being filled/For the chance to have it spilled". As if to prove the point, "Wondering Boy" is intermittently invaded by tape noise.
But at least half the songs on TITUS have pop hooks that would make anyone in the Hollies, the Raspberries or Big Star jealous. It's a self-consciously weird album, with Pollard making bizarre percussion noises, guitars distorting beyond hope, harmonies not quite matching, lyrics alluding puzzlingly to marchers in orange and nests of crows, and songs seeming to end just as they've begun. It's also a brilliant one, sounding something like a radio transmission from a distant planet where rock has been stripped of all its bombast and boiled down only to its melodic possibilities. As a bonus, the CD also includes all of PROPELLER, the last of GBV's vinyl-only albums, which features a fuller band, slightly fuller production and some of GBV's finest-ever classic-rock-manque songs. "Quality Of Armor", "Exit Flagger", "Lethargy" and a few others here have remained at the core of GBV's live repertoire, and deservedly so.|