The Releases: Space Gun (LP—GBVi, 2018) / Space Gun (Single—GBVi, 2018) / See My Field (Single—GBVi, 2018) / That’s Good (Single—GBVi, 2018)
I’ll get right to it this week: 2018’s Space Gun is, in my current estimation, the best of the soon-to-be-nineteen albums by the present-day Guided by Voices lineup. It ranked the highest on my 2021 Catalog Crawl feature—coming in at #13—and I’m skeptical that anything else that I’m yet to cover will surpass it; this includes the looming Thick Rich and Delicious (don’t believe in commas, Bob?), which is set for release at the end of next month.
Space Gun is tightly crafted: its fifteen songs breeze by in just under forty minutes; there are zero throwaways; the opening title track is a legitimate late-era gem; and—to borrow a phrase from the man himself—the production is thick, rich, and delicious. Yeah, this is a damn solid record.
But Space Gun is also a late-period GBV record, which means that it only needs to achieve the level of ‘damn solid’ in order to rise to the head of the class. The aforementioned title track is the only song that could stand next to the true Guided by Voices classics—and even then, it might appear more like the ‘plus one’ to something like “Chasing Heather Crazy” than a song that earned the invite on its own. The album is good—even threatening excellence at times—but it only would’ve topped a ‘best of 2018’ list from the most steadfast of GBV fans.
So, having gotten the ‘review’ part of this piece out of the way, I’d like to move on to another topic: the noble hobby of record collecting. I’ve been accumulating vinyl records for as long as I have conscious memory; among my collection are several are children’s LPs that I’ve owned for nearly my entire life. However, it wasn’t until roughly around the time of Space Gun that vinyl fully overtook CDs as my physical music media format of choice. For specific evidence, I purchased 2017’s August by Cake and How Do You Spell Heaven on CD, but I’ve acquired every subsequent GBV album on vinyl at the time of their release.
It wasn’t until the peak of the quarantine era that I became a full-fledged vinyl obsessive. The year before, I had acquired Frank Black’s masterful Teenager of the Year—one of my absolute favorite albums—in its special Record Store Day edition, and I set upon a goal of owning every album that I’ve awarded five stars on RateYourMusic on vinyl. However, the combination of social isolation and extreme online-ness that defined the pandemic era launched me toward a vinyl collecting mentality that probably would’ve happened eventually regardless. From the spring of 2020 to the present, my collection has exploded from roughly 150 records to nearly 2500.
And record collecting has come to influence much of my non-work activity. Every Friday afternoon, at the end of the work week, I make a trek to at least one of Portland’s several excellent record stores to spend a weekly ‘allowance’ that I would have thought absurd only a decade earlier. I’ve used record hunting as a motivator to explore previously-unknown cities like Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis, and Kansas City; and even far more exciting ones like London, Liverpool, and Edinburgh. Records are at the center of a significant number of my social interactions; and they (far and away) constitute the majority of the gifts that I give—including those for the young children of my friends.
But there’s something that undoubtedly complicates my record collecting hobby, just as it did during the era that CDs were my format of choice: I am a completist. Just yesterday, I spent twenty dollars to procure a U2 record that I actively hate; and not only because I decided that I needed it for an upcoming Strange Currencies project. Simply put, if I own more than a couple of albums by an artist, I feel compelled to acquire nearly everything in their catalog—save for bootlegs, color variants, and (most) live recordings, which I could scarcely give a shit about.
In the business of being a completist, there is one band that serves as a formidable ‘final boss.’ And if you’re reading this piece, you know exactly who I’m talking about. In constructing the parameters of The GBV Project, I came up with a list of 125 items: including all LPs, EPs, singles, compilations, and officially-released live albums—this includes a small handful of releases that are only available on CD. And of those 125 releases, I own 119 of them—including many that I originally bought on CD, but have subsequently replaced with vinyl editions.
And when I embarked upon this project, I aimed to complete my Guided by Voices collection. For Week 1, I spent more money than I had previously spent on a single-disc release to obtain a copy of Forever Since Breakfast. While visiting Chicago in January—to catch the anniversary tour for the aforementioned Teenager of the Year—I finally acquired the CD box set of Suitcase. I’ve lucked into in-store purchases of Fast Japanese Spin Cycle, Plantations of Pale Pink, and the “My Kind of Soldier” single; and I’ve utilized Discogs to acquire the likes of Wish in One Hand, the first installment of Briefcase, and the “Director’s Cut” edition of Bee Thousand. And while I’m far from wealthy—I’m comfortably part of the elusive and vanishing thing known as the “American middle class”—I spend my allotted ‘record money’ as if I were.
And of the six remaining pieces to my Guided by Voices completion puzzle, half of them are the three singles from Space Gun: the title track, “See My Field,” and “That’s Good”; for those wondering, the other three are The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet, Briefcase 3: Cuddling Bozo’s Octopus, and the single for “Just to Show You.” Those three Space Gun singles were limited to just 500 copies, and I could spend roughly $200 to acquire all three of them on Discogs. Yes, I could, but at this point, I’ve decided that I won’t. See, my friends, even self-avowed completists have their reasonable limitations.
After all, $200 is less than what I spent a little over a year ago to finally have a copy of Clube Da Esquina: my favorite album that I didn’t yet own on vinyl. I saw a copy of the deluxe vinyl box set for Brighten the Corners at Portland’s Jackpot Records for less than that last weekend. I could spend an entire day filling innumerable gaps in my collection by crawling on the floor of Crossroads Records for well under that same amount. So why should I spend that much on three late-period Guided by Voices singles with a total of five songs that I don’t already have on vinyl?
Yes, if nothing else, The GBV Project has (at least somewhat) freed me from the grips of intense completionism. After all, I won’t earn some kind of certificate once I have acquired all 125 of those Guided by Voices releases. And when it comes down to it, I’d much rather come across those missing half-dozen pieces of the puzzle in the wild, rather than just ordering them off of Discogs. It could take years—even decades—to find them all, but as I’ve reiterated over these past few weeks, there are a lot of other bands and artists out there beyond Guided by Voices.
Rating: Space Gun [LP] (7.8) / Space Gun (★★★★1/2) / See My Field (★★★★) / That’s Good (★★★★)
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “And the Star Wars people / Just look and laugh / They’ve seen my field / In a photograph / Ha ha ha” (“See My Field”)
Next Week: Guided by Voices release their first of three records in 2019 — and it’s a double album…
