Gbv Inc

This record is massive and amazing. Nowhere To Go But Up is Guided By Voices’ third album of 2023 (and thirty-ninth overall) and is a sprawling, wild adventure. With virtually no choruses and just two repeated lyrics in forty minutes, GBV is audacious and unafraid. One of the most fully realized works that Guided By Voices has created, Nowhere To Go But Up showcases an expert rock band at the top of their game. The band is on a roll and unstoppable. Following their monumental 40th Anniversary Celebration in Dayton, Ohio, GBV begins their fifth decade with a bang!

Guided By Voices: Welshpool Frillies [Vinyl LP]

Guided by Voices: La La Land [Vinyl LP]

Formed in 2001, the psychedelic rock trio Circus Devils features vocalist Robert Pollard, backed by brothers Todd Tobias and Tim Tobias. In their first album in six years, and their fifteenth overall, Circus Devils is back with Squeeze The Needle, a funhouse romp full of rock and roll swagger and childlike glee. The pounding psychedelia of the single “The Owl Presents…” harkens back to The Doors. Mixed into the twenty-track song collage are heavy rock thumpers (“Street Toughs,” “Mama’s Got A Brand New Snake”), cryptic interludes (“Age Of Transfusion”), and pretty acoustic pieces (“Difficult Dreamer,” “The Joke is Over”).

Pollard Robert: Waved Out [Vinyl LP]

Guided by Voices: Strut of Kings [Vinyl LP]

Universe Room is the eighteenth Guided By Voices album in ten years and packs a vast mix of energy levels and sounds into seventeen diverse tracks in less than forty minutes. The new record ventures into truly surprising territory, where barely any song segments and choruses are revisited and fidelity daringly shifts between lo-fi and hi-fi. “I wanted to create, hopefully, an experience, kind of a wild ride, where the listener would want to hear it multiple times in order to grasp all the sections and fields of sound to discover something new with each listen,” says Robert Pollard. “I trimmed down the songs so that there wasn’t a lot of repetition, so you get a lot of sections that happen only once or twice.” Universe Room embodies a realm of new horizons for Guided By Voices, who continue to redefine and expand as they blast off to unpredictable worlds.