Superman Was a Rocker is best described by its origin story: Former Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard rummages through a bunch of old cassettes, happens upon a handful of unreleased instrumental songs, overdubs some vocals, and releases a half-hour long album. Superman could be touted as a thrilling return to Pollard's four-track glory days, but the record is more accurately an update of largely subpar pre-recorded material. Though Pollard is often thought of as something of a savant, his best records have been products of intensive craft and focus. As a collection of reworked outtakes, Superman is innately handicapped and limited; not one song on the album is host to the inspired energy that characterizes Pollard's best work.
There is little to be gained from harping on the differences Pollard's lo-fi and hi-fi material. Pollard is capable of turning out a versatile array of extremely strong songs regardless of recording quality, and Bee Thousand's greatest strength is most certainly not its veil of tape hiss. Perhaps the most exciting facet of Guided by Voices' "classic" albums is their variety; Pollard has always been a fan of crediting his music to imaginary bands and conceptualizing his records as fictitious radio programs. Several of the songs on Superman Was a Rocker would work fine as stopgaps between undeniable jams on a proper Guided by Voices record, but fail to constitute an enjoyable album on their own.
That said, Superman is not without a handful of decent-to-good tracks. "Love Your Spaceman" is a solid Pollard outtake, on par with some of the better tracks on the Suitcase box sets. The instrumental on "Back to the Farm" is wisely left vocal-free, and makes for far and away the best moment here. The radio interview excerpt that precedes it is hilarious but, like many of the goofs on Superman, doesn't warrant repeat listens, and takes up an awful lot of space on an already-thin record.
Some of the most promising tracks on Superman seem thoroughly compromised by the album's approach; in "Peacock", some good vocal ideas are stifled by the instrumental's rigid and predetermined structure. Superman Was a Rocker is host to its share of entertaining gags and solidly musical moments, but even at a scant thirty minutes it feels stretched and slight. While it's impressive that there's still halfway-decent archival material for Pollard to dress up and put out, it's hard to recommend Superman Was a Rocker to anyone who hasn't already exhausted the three or four hundred better songs Pollard has already released.
