The Releases: The Bears for Lunch (LP—GBVi, 2012) / White Flag (Single—GBVi, 2012) / Everywhere Is Miles From Everywhere (Single—GBVi, 2012) / Hangover Child (Single—GBVi, 2012)
In last week’s piece, I alluded to the fact that among Guided by Voices’ 2012 albums, The Bears for Lunch was easily my favorite at the time; and I speculated that it would continue to be so upon this reexamination. And to absolutely no surprise, that proved to be the case. The Bears for Lunch is not only the standout of the 2012 LPs, but it also represented the recorded highpoint of the reunited classic lineup—sorry to semi-spoil the next three entries in this project. To go even a step further, unless I’m very pleasantly surprised by any of the deluge of records that the “post-classic lineup reunion” incarnation has released over the past decade, The Bears for Lunch will remain my favorite GBV album to see the light of day since Robert Pollard first retired the band in 2004.
And there are plenty of highlights to cite in a rundown of Bears’ nineteen tracks. It starts off strong with “King Arthur the Red.” It ends even better with the single “Everywhere Is Miles From Everywhere.” In between, Pollard unleashes excellent chugging rockers (“Hangover Child,” “The Challenge Is Much More,” and “She Lives in an Airport”), charming lo-fi oddities (“Dome Rust,” “Finger Gang”), and even a gentle acoustic track (“You Can Fly Anything Right”) that harkens back to GBV’s golden era. Tobin Sprout makes his best album-length showing of the reunion era (and perhaps ever?) with genuine standouts like “Skin to Skin Combat,” “The Corners Are Glowing,” “Waking Up the Stars,” and (especially) “Waving at Airplanes.” This isn’t just a good reunion era album. It’s an excellent Guided by Voices record. Period.
And—as I’ve done over the past couple of weeks—I could center this week’s piece around how this particular record fit into my own personal narrative. The Bears for Lunch arrived a few months after my move to Oregon: a time in which I still felt pretty young; when my now-adult kids were very young; when my job felt new; and when I had the excitement of adjusting to life in a city that may not have been perfect, but felt like the perfect place for me and my family. Even though the autumn of 2012 wasn’t that long ago, it’s a time that I don’t have to work too hard to conjure up plenty of nostalgia for; and even though The Bears for Lunch may have been less central to my soundtrack of that time than the likes of Lonerism, The Idler Wheel, Channel Orange, Shields, or good kid m.A.A.d city, it was still a very good album by a much-loved band.
And I could probably get into some GBV context again after skipping it last week. Bears arrived just five months after Class Clown Spots a UFO, which came just five months after Let’s Go Eat the Factory. It was largely met with the same ‘hey, this ain’t bad’ critical response as its predecessors; although those critics tended to focus more on the long-dormant band’s sudden prolificacy than they did on the actual musical content of the album. And while that was something of a lazy talking point, it wasn’t as if GBV had undergone some sort of dramatic artistic evolution in less time than a bag of shredded cheese takes to expire. And in all fairness to fans, it was a little easy to get lost in the flood of new material from the band. Admittedly, the same has happened for me during the current iteration of the band—whatever it is that the folks who follow it more closely than I do call it (GBV-V3? The Second Great Quintet?).
No, I don’t really want to focus on any of those things—at least any more than I’ve already ‘not focused’ on them. I’d rather narrow down my scope for the remaining paragraphs to just two-and-a-quarter minutes of The Bears for Lunch. After all, if even an excellent album can get lost in the midst of an abundance of material, imagine how easy it can be for just one song to go unnoticed—especially when it trades in a subtlety that Guided by Voices is not typically known for.
And if you really know this album, chances are you already know exactly which song I’m talking about. In fact, I alluded to it all the way back in January in my piece on GBV’s full-length debut, Devil Between My Toes. In discussing that album’s transcendent “The Tumblers,” I referred to the song as “an almost entirely unique entity in the Guided by Voices catalog.” That qualifying almost was then explained to be a nod to 2012’s “White Flag”: the finest moment on The Bears for Lunch, and my pick for the best post-“Jill Hives” track in GBV’s discography.
But unlike “The Best of Jill Hives,” “Game of Pricks,” “If We Wait,” “Teenage FBI,” or any of the dozens of absolute masterpieces in the Robert Pollard Songbook, “White Flag” is easy to miss. It doesn’t hit you over the head with an instantly-unforgettable melody. There’s no off-the-wall sound or lyric that forces you to move the needle back a few revolutions in order to find out if you heard it right. You could conceivably hear it dozens of times without ever committing it to memory or taking notice of what makes it so great. And in its own way, that’s what makes it so great.
Like “The Tumblers,” “White Flag” was a song that I didn’t catch until after several listens. Regarding my fall 2012 listens to The Bears for Lunch, I can vaguely remember thinking that the ‘low-key song in the middle of the album’ was good; but I’d be lying if I told you that I immediately pegged it as something special. I’ll bet it took me awhile to even notice the lonesome organ in the fade out, or just how much Greg Demos’ bass line sounded like it could have been played by Peter Hook some time in the winter of 1980. Embarrassingly, there’s even a non-zero chance that I wondered why it was chosen as a single over something more ‘conventionally appealing’ like “She Lives in an Airport.”
No, my early listens to “White Flag” weren’t revelatory; mostly because I had never listened to Guided by Voices attuned in the way that one needs to be in order to hear the greatness of a song like “White Flag.” I listen for a hook like the one that opens “Gold Star for Robot Boy.” I snap to attention at a non-sequitur like “you know what the deal is, dude.” I grab a guitar to learn how to play “Cut-Out Witch” or “Watch Me Jumpstart.” “White Flag” is mostly instrumental. It’s built around a meandering chord progression. It chugs along for a minute-and-a-half, and then descends into a slow fadeout.
And unlike anything else in GBV’s enormous body of work—even “The Tumblers”—it’s atmospheric and vibe-y as all hell. In a piece that I wrote on Antena’s “Camino del Sol” a few years back, I marveled at that song’s ability to evoke both warmth and coldness at the same time—likening it to “a sensation not unlike the one that you might get from standing by a bonfire on a brisk autumn evening.” And somehow, this band of middle-aged Ohio drinking buddies, on a reunion album that arrived a quarter-century after their debut, managed to accomplish something remarkably similar.
We don’t listen to Guided by Voices for this kind of thing, do we? We want a melody that towers to the sky. We grin at the imagery conjured by an academy of lies. But what goes up surely must come down. And in those early evening moments, when the sun seems to be caught between the impulses to drift either ‘up’ or ‘down,’ we may just want something even more evocative than what all the Robot Boys and Cut-Out Witches of the world could ever give us.
And in that case, have I ever got a song for you.
Ratings: The Bears for Lunch (8.2) / White Flag (★★★★★) / Everywhere Is Miles From Everywhere (★★★★) / Hangover Child (★★★★)*
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “She lives in an airport, so I get to travel for free / And just like that bastard, the world is much smaller to me / Her special offer is quite the bargain / No stipulations or sales-pitch jargon” (“She Lives in an Airport”)
Next Week: The classic lineup starts to lose some momentum.
