The Release: Thick Rich and Delicious (LP—GBVi, 2025)
This piece is the final entry in a year-long project. To go to the beginning, click here.
When I began The GBV Project at the start of this year, I was forced to consider what exactly might transpire in the Pollardverse over the course of 2025. On a purely logistical note, I needed to fashion a guess as to how many Guided by Voices albums would be released. I left room for three, and when it became apparent that there would only be a pair of new studio LPs, it gave me the green light to devote a week to the 2003 Human Amusements at Hourly Rates compilation. But beyond new records, I didn’t anticipate any major developments; and with the band’s decision to stop touring revealed in a slow and evolving manner, even that revelation was met with little more than a handful of passing mentions in these fifty-three pieces.
Likewise, I suspected that the project would eventually stray from merely chronicling the history of one band in a series of weekly album reviews; and thus, I knew that my writing would in part be a reaction to both happenings in my own life and the wider world. Some of these happenings were expected, and some weren’t. The surprises were of both the pleasant and tragic varieties. Sometimes I addressed them bluntly, and sometimes I avoided writing about them altogether. And—as anyone who kept up with the project is aware—there were weeks that I effectively tied these goings-on back to Guided by Voices, ones where those connections were tenuous at best, and others in which I didn’t even try.
And through it all, something that I’ve long known to be true was reiterated time and again: the business of prediction, no matter the subject, is a fool’s errand. To demonstrate, let us take a look at Our Man Pollard. On one hand, Bob Pollard seems to be the most predictable character in pop music history. You know that each new year will bring a flurry of activity, including at least a few records released under varying monikers. In fact, Pollard is so predictable that there’s a website which allows you to generate completely plausible GBV song titles; my own band once used it for a song called “Electrified Tape Centennial.”
But the Madman of Dayton always keeps us guessing too. There were the revolving-door lineups of the pre-current incarnations of Guided by Voices. There’s the fact that throughout Pollard’s catalog, you’ll find hidden gems relegated to short-run EPs and one-off compilations that were only released by tiny labels. There’s the legendary ‘suitcase’ that has yielded a bottomless bounty of both trash and treasure. There was the genuinely shocking inability to deliver a breakthrough hit once Pollard was finally given a sizable budget. Even beyond his always-cryptic transmissions, Bob Pollard is an enigma.
And yet, despite knowing all of this, I couldn’t help but make a prediction back in September, when covering 2018’s Space Gun. Here’s an excerpt from that piece:
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, which is set for release at the end of next month.
Even with my awareness of the fact that very few artistic careers progress in a completely linear fashion, this felt like an exceedingly safe prediction. And coming hot on the heels of Universe Room—one of only three Guided by Voices records with a sub-3.0 score on RateYourMusic—it seemed doubly so. Even a regression to the mean would have merely resulted in an album landing somewhere between the likes of Welshpool Frillies and Earth Man Blues.
But I didn’t account for the Pollard Factor. I didn’t consider the fact that, despite releasing plenty of ‘meh’ records over the past decade, every year or two GBV drops an album (Space Gun, Sweating the Plague, Surrender Your Poppy Field, Tremblers and Goggles by Rank, Strut of Kings) that gives us a glimpse of the old Pollard magic. They rarely sustain this over the course of forty-or-so minutes, but those records remind us of what Bob is still capable of, even at this later stage of his career.
So no, I absolutely did not expect Guided by Voices to release their best album in over two decades, and that in doing so, they would provide a happy ending to a project that has quite honestly felt like something of a chore over these past few months. And while I know how much opinions can vary—I’m certain that most GBV fans reading this have at least one personal favorite that I implied was part of the ‘meh’ batch of recent records—I’m far from the only person out there singing the praises of Thick Rich and Delicious.
Each of the new album’s advance singles were well received by the commentariat of RateYourMusic—a community that has largely displayed jadedness toward the band’s recent work. Several publications that hadn’t reviewed a new GBV release in years gave enthusiastic thumbs-up to the record. And Magnet magazine—admittedly, a very pro-GBV outlet—placed Thick Rich and Delicious at the top of their year-end album ranking: three spots ahead of the most buzzed-about rock record in years.
But I also feel inclined to state that I don’t think Thick Rich and Delicious is a masterpiece. I certainly don’t agree with the ultra-enthusiastic fans that have called it the band’s best album. In fact, I might even have a hard time finding a spot for it in my own top ten GBV records. And even though I’ve been uncharacteristically ‘hands-off’ when it comes to discovering new music in the post-pandemic era, there are several 2025 albums that I would argue are significantly better than Thick Rich and Delicious.
But that’s not the point. No reasonable person is expecting a sixty-eight year old Robert Pollard to deliver some kind of generation- or scene-defining masterpiece. Guided by Voices already did that, twice, over thirty years ago. At this point, getting a full album’s worth of well-crafted, memorable songs that find the perfect GBV equilibrium between ‘catchy,’ ‘rocking,’ and ‘offbeat’ is the best that we can expect. And I, for one, had kind of given up on expecting even that.
But for over forty years now, Guided by Voices has been an art project that thrives on defying expectations. It began as little more than a group of schlubby dudes, drinking cheap beer in their basements, inspired by both transcendentalists and The Who. They were jocks who embraced surrealism. They were outsiders in the most mundane setting imaginable. They got together on evenings and weekends, in large part to escape the drudgery of the nine-to-five life. In time, they would grow a cult following big enough to where an American president (a good one) would utter their name in a speech, simply because his press secretary/speechwriter was a fan.
And of course, at the center of this art project was a truly singular figure in the history of American pop culture: a schoolteacher who daydreamed of rock stardom, and infused his own songs with the childlike wonder that he observed daily in his fourth-grade classroom; a multi-sport star athlete who created fake album covers, with fake song titles, for fake bands, until he eventually had no choice but to make them real; a man who drank as prolifically as he wrote, but who still managed to perform mic twirls and high leg kicks into his late-sixties. This one-of-a-kind artist was perhaps best summed up by his friend, Mike Lipps, in the 2005 book Guided by Voices: A Brief History:
“I just can’t understand how a guy who can make you laugh until it fucking hurts, who talks about nothing but sports and shit when we’re home, just like us, can write songs so beautiful they make you cry.”
After spending a year diving into the impossibly deep well of Robert Pollard’s primary artistic outlet, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that we’re just not supposed to understand him; and that, in accepting that, Bob Pollard somehow becomes the most understandable creative figure imaginable. I know that doesn’t really make any sense, but somehow, it makes perfect sense.
Or something like that…
Rating: Thick Rich and Delicious (8.3)
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “And he’s a well-worn try / But if the well runs dry, we’ll see / And if it overflows / It’d be a well-won victory / Never let you down / What’s that sound?” (“Our Man Syracuse”)
