The Releases: Mirrored Aztec (LP—GBVi, 2020)
This past week I had a friend—and Strange Currencies contributor—in town for a few days. Much of the time that we spent together centered around music-related activities. We hit up Portland’s best record store, Mississippi Records. We spent a few hours crate digging at a record show. We visited several restaurants and bars that put very intentional effort into their playlists—at no less than three of them did my friend comment positively on the music selections. And on his last night in town, we caught an excellent show by an old favorite, Alejandro Escovedo.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my closest friendships are with people whose social lives are largely defined by music: the kind of people who are more comfortable at a record shop than a party; the kind of people who quantify musical taste as some form of social currency (no matter how strange it might seem to those on the outside). In fact, since all the way back to high school, I’ve often found it difficult to forge lasting bonds with people whose social interactions are merely informed by music, as opposed to being defined by it.
But what happens when those social lives are interrupted? Five years ago, the weekend that I just spent with a friend of now-thirty years would have been impossible. Record stores—at least the ones that were open at the time—were hardly gathering spots. The idea of holding a record show would have been absurd. Restaurants were only operating in a limited capacity or on a take-out basis. Concerts would have inevitably become “super spreader” events.
And we all adapted as best as we could. For the first couple of months, I could call Music Millennium and arrange a curbside delivery. By summertime, that shop had reopened in a limited capacity. Ten patrons could be inside of the store at a time. They were asked to wear masks and gloves, use hand sanitizer, move through the many-leveled shop in a unidirectional manner, and to be considerate of those waiting for their turn to come inside. I would go at least once a week—often standing in a line for an hour, looking into the shop in the same manner that a childhood version of myself had once peered through the gates of Disneyland before they opened for the day.
Local restaurants adapted in their own unique ways. Many adopted or expanded their outside seating, oftentimes utilizing the curb space along city streets that were far less busy than usual. Partially because we were outside, and partially because it wasn’t necessary for their literal survival, the eclectic playlists that characterized many of Portland’s more interesting restaurants went silent. Following my oldest daughter’s high school graduation (a drive-thru ceremony), we tried to have the most ‘normal’ celebration dinner possible. This meant breaking our “no chains” rule by eating at the Olive Garden in a room with only the four members of our immediate family, and occasional visits from a masked server. Like the food, I’m sure the music that was played there could be described as ‘pleasant enough, but hardly memorable.’
Despite creative efforts to make live-stream shows serve as temporary stand-ins for in-person concerts, there was no real substitute for the communal experience of the real thing. The closest that I felt any sense of community as part of an audience during that time was in reading other peoples’ real-time reactions to Fetch the Bolt Cutters, or parsing through “Murder Most Foul” with other amateur internet sleuths. At the then-recently-launched Strange Currencies, we discovered the ability to collaborate via Slack chats, which led to our In the Wilderness series.
As for the subject of this particular project, those strange times certainly impacted the functionality of Guided by Voices. While Mirrored Aztec was released right in the middle of abnormality, the practical impact of the “new normal” would be felt far more with its follow-up, Styles We Paid For. Aztec, however, had been recorded before the world changed. To take it in now, the most notably different thing about the album may very well be that its psychedelic cover art represented a significant break from the collages and/or photographs that had traditionally adorned GBV records. Or perhaps it was the fact that this was the first GBV album in some time to not be accompanied by any singles. But, from a strictly musical perspective, Mirrored Aztec was mostly “business as usual.”
However, that’s not how we received the new Guided by Voices record when it arrived that summer. I’m certain that I purchased Mirrored Aztec during one of those masked visits to Music Millennium. I’m guessing that I felt like it was ‘fine,’ but I honestly don’t have too many real-time recollections about it. This may have been a product of weird times. It may have been a case of “GBV fatigue”—this was the band’s fifth album in a year-and-a-half. It might have also been the fact that other music was holding my attention better. This is right around the time that I discovered the Numero Group—and particularly the endless well of Eccentric Soul titles—and began making weekly treks to Mississippi Records to buy more Numero releases.
Whatever it was that led to my relative lack of listens to Mirrored Aztec, it resulted in a record that I didn’t remember all that well as I returned to it this week. With most of the albums in the Guided by Voices catalog, I’m capable of at least drumming up some nostalgia for the time period in which I first heard them. However—aside from getting to sleep in on a regular basis—there’s is nothing about the era of Mirrored Aztec that I feel any kind of nostalgia for.
Rating: Mirrored Aztec (6.9)
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “I turn it on / Watch the brains fall out / Where the target is tender / Saturn’s ring around your finger” (“Haircut Sphinx”)
Next Week: The third Guided by Voices album of 2020 finds the venerable rock institution having to adapt to unprecedented circumstances.
