The Releases: Please Be Honest (LP—GBVi, 2016)
When I compiled my first Catalog Crawl piece in 2021, I opted to go big by choosing the most prolific band in modern music. And—as invariably must occur in a ranked list of anything—some album would need to occupy the bottom spot in Guided by Voices’ discography. That album was 2016’s Please Be Honest. And despite the handful of protestations that appeared when I posted a link to said article on a GBV-related Facebook group, it was hardly an unorthodox opinion. Of the forty-one full-length Guided by Voices albums cataloged on RateYourMusic, Please Be Honest holds the lowest score (2.88).
The good news for the vociferous defenders of Please Be Honest is that it would no longer come in last in my re-ranking of GBV’s albums. For anyone keeping track of such things, my rating of 1987’s Sandbox is a couple ticks lower than the score that you’ll find at the bottom of this week’s piece. The bad news for those folks though, is that I still don’t find Please Be Honest to be a particularly good Guided by Voices album.
Things start off promisingly: “My Zodiac Companion” is an excellently pounding opener; “Kid on a Ladder” houses one of the album’s best hooks; “Come on Mr. Christian” and “Glittering Parliaments” are solid, if not exactly remarkable. However, after the first-third of Please Be Honest, this is easily the most listless record in GBV’s mammoth body of work. In fact, aside from title track, the last ten songs on Please Be Honest are practically forgettable. And while I could devote the rest of this piece to a track-by-track analysis of a rarely-bad-but-never-great Guided by Voices album, there’s another question that I think may be worth pondering instead, and that is: what exactly constitutes a Guided by Voices album?
I bring this up now, because the circumstances surrounding the creation of Please Be Honest seem to demand it. When we last checked in on Guided by Voices, they had broken up shortly after four-fifths of the reunited “classic lineup” released 2014’s Cool Planet. Granted, Robert Pollard’s statement after the breakup left some room for interpretation: “It’s time to wrap it up with this particular entity.” Technically, “this particular entity” could have merely meant that specific lineup; although most interpreted it to mean Guided by Voices as a project.
But can you ever really count GBV out? After all, only six years after the highly-publicized and not-at-all-ambiguous breakup that followed 2004’s The Electrifying Conclusion tour, Guided by Voices were once again taking the stage for their reunion. And after the second breakup, barely a year would pass before Suitcase 4 arrived, featuring newly-recorded songs by Bob Pollard and Nick Mitchell. Fool me once, Bob, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
And here’s the most curious thing. When Guided by Voices returned with Please Be Honest in April 2016, the inner record sleeve contained the following note: “All songs written and performed by Robert Pollard.” Yes, Please Be Honest was essentially a Pollard solo record in a Guided by Voices jacket. And of course, it’s not as if Robert Pollard hadn’t been releasing solo records during that same era; his twenty-fifth, Of Course You Are, arrived just seven weeks prior to Please Be Honest. His own Teenage Guitar project had also released a pair of LPs in the two years leading up to Please Be Honest.
So why was this new record—and not a particularly remarkable one—released under the Guided by Voices name? I have a theory; and it’s not one that seems all that far-fetched. It’s also one that might not be the most flattering—at least to those who believe in the sanctity of traditional GBV. In order to illustrate it, I’ll have to use myself as an example; but I believe that my own experience might not be all that different from those of a typical GBV superfan.
I mentioned earlier that much of the material on Please Be Honest stands among the least memorable in the GBV discography. But my lack of memorizing these songs should not be equated to a lack of effort. I’ve listened to Please Be Honest plenty of times; not in the same realm as Alien Lanes or Mag Earwhig say, but probably in a similar range to albums like Same Place the Fly Got Smashed or Class Clown Spots a UFO. And ultimately, I remember that latter pair of records far better than Please Be Honest, essentially because the songs from them are far better at working their way into that part of my brain that is allocated for such things.
But even though I haven’t internalized Please Be Honest in the same way that I have Bee Thousand, I still know it better than any Robert Pollard solo record. Yes, I’m more familiar with a “bad” Guided by Voices record than I am with legitimately good Pollard ones like Not in My Airforce, Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, or From a Compound Eye. And even though this is a ‘me’ problem, like I alluded to before, I don’t think it’s an ‘exclusively me’ one.
You see, as Robert Pollard must know, there’s a certain cachet held by a record that appears under the Guided by Voices moniker: one that probably doesn’t come with even the best Robert Pollard solo joints. It’s not fair to the art itself, but it’s the way these things go. I’ve never seen the books for GBV Inc., but I’m willing to venture that 2013’s coolly-received English Little League sold more copies than that same year’s well-reviewed Honey Locust Honky Tonk. And I’m guessing that of the two albums that Pollard released in 2016, Please Be Honest garnered more attention (and sales) than Of Course You Are. And so, if it’s already been well-established that Guided by Voices can be Robert Pollard and whoever else he says it is, why not release a solo record as a GBV one?
And I get that this comes off as a bit cynical. Undoubtedly, at a certain point in his career, when Robert Pollard was working up a new song, he was also weighing whether or not it would go into the bucket for GBV, Teenage Guitar, Boston Spaceships, or any of his other innumerable collaborations and solo projects. But now, why not attach your new music to the project that was bound to garner the most attention, press, and sales? And if you think I’m crazy, compare how many full-length records Pollard has released by non-GBV projects (five) to the number of GBV ones (nineteen) since Please Be Honest.
And there are circumstances that add nuance to both those GBV and non-GBV album totals. The GBV ones are the work of the solidified (and extremely prolific) lineup that Pollard formed after releasing Please Be Honest. The non-GBV ones are those featuring personnel beyond that now-consistent quintet. Certainly Bob Pollard has found a group of musicians that he is comfortable working with and writing for, but it’s also abundantly clear that the hardest-working man in indie rock has been directing the vast majority of his songs toward the bucket labeled ‘GBV,’ and not the one labeled ‘Other.’
And while I certainly don’t begrudge Mr. Pollard for doing so, it does seem like a somewhat-unwelcome peek behind the curtain of the Songwriting Madman of Dayton. You’d like to believe that he was so inspired, and that the countless flood of songs that came into his head just had to be flitted into whatever metaphorical bin made the most sense—before he either forgot those ideas, or moved onto the next ones. But you’d also like to believe that there was some kind of method to it all; that there was some reason in that brain of his that could explain why “Learning to Hunt” was a GBV song, while “Wrinkled Ghost” was a solo one.
I guess what I’m saying is, that thinking about how Robert Pollard decided to go (mostly) all-in on Guided by Voices—and to do so with one of the weakest albums in the project’s catalog—takes some of the magic away. And if that sounds nitpicky or even harsh, I’m just being honest. It’s what he asked me to do.
Rating: 6.4
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “Come on Mr. Christian / Hand me the plug / I’ve seen better heads / In animal beds / Let’s go to sleep now” (“Come on Mr. Christian”)
Next Week: A new era begins, with the most stable (and prolific) lineup in the history of Guided by Voices.
