Pitchfork

In addition to the phalanx of regular Guided By Voices releases, bandleader Robert Pollard issued the four-disc box set Suitcase in 2000. Filled with tapes of home-recorded demos and unreleased songs, it was a lower-than-lo-fi trip through the underbelly of the band's overwhelming output. Suitcase 2 picks up where the first Suitcase left off, documenting and releasing a seemingly bottomless trove of unreleased Pollard tracks. Even the art on the spine stretches across all four discs: You'll listen to all four in their entirety and you'll fucking like it, says Pollard.

A few things that anyone who's given a shit outside of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes will care about: The wonderful packaging, and a newer batch of outtakes extending to 2005 post-breakup material. Where the original Suitcase box was full of behind-the-scenes photos and fawning journalists' quotes to convince you that GBV was the most important band ever, this one does away with the context entirely. In the Watch Me Jumpstart documentary, Pollard describes sitting in the back of a high-school art class, creating cover art and band names long before Guided By Voices had been fully realized. Suitcase 2 makes that daydreaming concrete: Every panel of the booklet and CD is a sleeve design for Skag or Bug-Eyed Mums or one of the other never-were bands credited on Suitcase 2.

The box is scattered, as expected, but the songs collected go a long way to indicate that, contrary to popular belief, Pollard has a measure of control over his songwriting. As the author of an estimated 5,000-plus songs, it's easy to see him as beer-swilling savant, committing everything to tape with no regard to quality. The Suitcase boxes indicate that he is not only a diverse songwriter, but a keenly self-aware one as well. The demos from Isolation Drills in particular stick out, showing how consciously Pollard had changed his style and what a weird record Drills is-- songs like "Headache Revolution" and "Daughter of the Gold Rush" come fully-formed with an undercurrent of melancholy. Older pre-band tracks are steeped in the shadow of 70s rock radio, but songs like "It's Only Up to You" are rare chances to hear Pollard sounding vulnerable. Not everything works, like the ridiculous western accent on "Lonely Town", and there's more heaving than singing on "My Dream Making Machine", but the elegiac "Two or Three Songs" actually pulls off the navel-gazing, and the rallying call of "no trash at all, I'm gonna throw it all out" from "Sacred Space" shows he's conscious of the process at the very least.

Sure, there are extraneous instrumentals, and some of the inebriated fun is more inebriated than fun ("The Golden Pickle", "Zarkoff's Coming"). Pound-for-pound, song-for-song, it doesn't live up to the first box, but Suitcase 2 provides the same kind of thrills and spills as its predecessor: blow-the dust-off gems that poke our anthropological pleasure centers ("Stingy Queens" is another unearthed burst of brilliance from the aborted The Power of Suck concept album), the gleefully raucous ("Bye Bye Song"), the cast-offs ("Tainted Angels and Butter Knives", later issued under its working title, "Jason Lowenstein's a Wanker") the don't-fits ("I Am Decided" was recorded for Under The Bushes, Under the Stars sessions and was so good Kim Deal had to steal it for The Amps' only record), the alternate versions ("Paper Girl", "Proud and Booming Industry"), the songs-in-progress ("Rocket Head" is a hilarious embryonic "Teenage FBI"; "Sacred Space" would become "Office of Hearts"), and a rambling answering machine message ("What About The Rock?"). Curiously thrown in are outtakes from Pollard's first solo record, Not in My Airforce, further blurring the line between where Pollard stops and GBV begins.

One Pollard criticism can't be deflected here, however-- Pollard's peak was the mid-1990s, culminating with the Under the Bushes sessions, when he was ridiculously prolific and consistently inspired. "Stingy Queens" and "I Am Decided" tower over most of the material here, and the Not in My Airforce demos, recorded near the same time, hold their own against the few outtakes from the band's back-to-back acknowledged classics ("You're Not the Queen Anymore" alone reps Alien Lanes). The hiss-covered early tracks are way more fun than any myth-building behind-the-curtain ephemera should be, and the Isolation Drills demos show he could shift and change, but the mid-nineties material is what's worth going back to. But I've always felt that the tape experiments and ramblings are more an inclusive joke than an annoying distraction, and a laugh is better than a half-baked melody. The problem isn't that the four discs are too much; the thing that's really fucking infuriating is that if you spend the time, you will find those scattered brilliant songs. It's not that Pollard's releasing trash or writing too much for his own good, it's that only a very few highly organized and highly devotional non-family members can hope to keep up with him.

 

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