When Guided by Voices played the Colorado stop of Riot Fest last summer, it might as well have been a time warp. The set was eerily similar to the group’s performances in their mid-1990s prime, all wobbles and grumbles with an occasional flash of off-kilter transcendence. But there were elements of the performance that were jarringly different as well, namely an exhibition of cold, canned efficiency that almost utterly undermined the air of confusion and chaos that Robert Pollard and company once brought to their music. That workmanlike quality—both charismatic and chilling—has grown since GBV reformed for their lackluster 2012 album Let’s Go Eat the Factory, and it’s carried over into their sixth comeback full-length, Cool Planet. The line between exhilarating and exasperating is still being straddled to the point where it's starting to chafe.
Cool Planet coasts on the same mix of curdled ballads, power-pop sparklers, and tossed-off oddities as its most recent predecessors, but there’s a decided kick to the album’s handful of true gems. “Authoritarian Zoo” could be accused of setting the bar too high too early; it's a hammering anthem in which Pollard croons with slightly out-of-tune relish about animals and paranoia—the kind of mangled pileup of imagery that once informed GBV’s best pop songs, and still does. “Pan Swimmer” continues the trend of vintage Pollard made fresh, a 62-second hook-burst that explodes like a time-lapse blossom, while the sprawling-by-comparison “Males of Wormwood Mars” represents the record’s most inspired three minutes. Over an infectious drum fill and riffs that shift between gentle jangle and chunky distortion, Pollard weaves a magic-realist-meets-sci-fi narrative that could pass as a Soft Boys b-side.
The tipping point from mosaic to mishmash happens somewhere near “Psychotic Crush”, a promising squiggle of psychedelia—complete with mocking guitar figure—that ultimately can’t pay its vast debt to Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men”. “Table at Fool’s Tooth” is more successful in its stately yet shambolic, punk-meets-Jethro-Tull pastiche, but on “Hat of Flames”, GBV curiously flops at trying to copy GBV—namely every other song from Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, the period of the group’s own catalog that their current incarnation has most avidly tried to revive. When stacked against inspired tracks like “Cool Planet”, whose apocalyptic power-pop veers spiritedly from triumphalism to fatalism, a backpedaling rehash—let alone half an album of them—just doesn’t cut it.
Ballad-wise, Cool Planet spectacularly disappoints. Save for two stellar, simmering delicacies sung by Tobin Sprout—“Narrated by Paul” and “Ticket to Hide”, both of which shout their gleeful Beatles references even as Sprout himself whispers, especially on the sumptuous, piano-led former cut—the album is strangled by its slower moments. Pollard barely shows up on “Cream of Lung”, a dull muddle that sounds as lively as if it were recorded while he brushed his teeth. “Bad Love Is Easy to Do” fails in its attempt to be direct and sentimental, but worse off is “Fast Crawl”, which spoons out meandering sludge in unsavory lumps. Where GBV’s slovenly, dilapidated grandeur once felt vital and radical, it now putters along crankily, the sound of a band muttering to itself rather than playing to anyone in particular, themselves included. There’s a certain charm to that, of course. It’s just not always enough.
