The Release: Nowhere to Go But Up (LP—GBVi, 2023)
I’m tired, Bob. At this point of The GBV Project, I’m merely coasting on the momentum built up by the previous forty-nine weeks. There are just so many albums. And not only are they starting to sound the same, but the narrative surrounding each of them is remarkably similar.
For each of these past several weeks, I’ve devoted a significant amount of my listening time to an album that received middling reviews upon release; was enthusiastically praised by the devout, many of whom described it as “the best GBV record since (insert recent favorite here)”; has a small handful of doubters who claim it to be far worse than the very-similar-sounding records that surround it; and has a similar number who excitedly refer to it as “their best since (insert not-so-recent classic here).” And every week, I listen to this record anywhere from three to six times, assign it a score not too far from the important dividing line between decent and pretty good (essentially a 7.0), and then move on to the next one.
And I’m not happy about this, Bob. I want to be moved by these records. I want to be compelled to listen to them for a purpose other than ‘completion.’ I want to risk losing my always-tenuous November/December voice by yelling out the words to these songs on my morning commute. I want to love these records. But even more importantly, I want to remember them.
That’s right, Bob. Every time I put on one of these recent GBV albums, there’s only the vaguest hint of familiarity to them. And I’m not usually like this with music. I have a memory that plenty of acquaintances have marveled at—especially when it comes to the trivial details about the music that I love. But right now, I’m listening to La La Land‘s “Ballroom Etiquette”—a song that I’ve heard at least a dozen times since its release in early 2023—and it’s only in the outro where I snap to attention and say, “oh yeah, I remember this one.”
On one hand, I want this to be a ‘me’ problem. Maybe I’ve just been oversaturated by too much GBV in too little time to remember it all. But no, that’s not the case. I hadn’t really dove into the Suitcase sets until this year, and there are plenty of those four-hundred songs that I can remember by title alone, even though I’ve probably listened to them less than “Ballroom Etiquette.”
But when I think about it, I’m not sure how much I remember about the recent-ish Guided by Voices albums that ended up well north of the 7.0 line. Surrender Your Poppy Field was one of those, but looking at the track listing, the only song that I can easily conjure up from memory is “Volcano.” Clearly when I listened to that one I liked it more than something like Zeppelin Over China or Crystal Nuns Cathedral, but apparently not enough to commit it to my long-term memory.
And this stretch of three albums from 2023 has been particularly tough for me to internalize. Maybe it’s because the Beatles kick that I said I wasn’t going to indulge in this year two weeks ago actually did materialize. And that’s some tough competition, Bob. I can’t expect you to compete with the Fab Four, right? Although some would argue that, at least in your prime, you could.
I thought about combatting this issue by making a playlist that gathers my favorite songs from La La Land, Welshpool Frillies, and Nowhere to Go But Up. I’d pick a single LP’s worth of material, and listen to it several times, in order to really get to know those tracks well. After all, Bob, one of the common things that critics have always pointed out about your work is that you could actually release one album for every three records worth of material that you write. You know: all killer, no filler. But I decided against it. I’ve made a lot of playlists throughout this project already. And really, not many of these songs were jumping out at me all that much. Besides, I need to summarize the entire ‘current lineup’ era with a playlist soon enough.
So here we are. Three straight weeks where my overall impression of a Guided by Voices record has been a resounding ‘meh.’ But it doesn’t necessarily have to stay this way forever, Bob. Perhaps some day in the future, I’ll pull Nowhere to Go But Up from my record shelf on a whim, and not as part of some project that—at this moment—is feeling like a case of overcommitment. And maybe I’ll hear something in it that didn’t quite register with me the first several times listening to it.
I’m definitely not ruling it out…
Rating: Nowhere to Go But Up (6.8)
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “A stagehand filed an anonymous complaint / When you kicked over the jack of legs / The contents of the body / Every prop in the play / Came crashing down / And ruining the entire display” (“Jack of Legs”)
Next Week: 2024 arrives, but with only a single new Guided by Voices record.
