The Middle Of A Cold Premonition

Guided by Voices “Colonel Paper”

I’ve been following Bob Pollard and Guided by Voices since my conversion to Pollard fandom in the late ’90s, but over the past five or six years, I’ve had a hard time keeping up with Bob’s pace. I check in with pretty much every record, but I don’t always find the connection I’m looking for. I don’t want to say that Bob has been uninspired, but I will say that some of what he’s been up to hasn’t really inspired me.

So it’s nice to find some straight-up GBV gems on Space Gun, a record that really takes advantage of the fact that Doug Gillard is back in the band. Gillard is by far my favorite Pollard collaborator, and his guitar playing brings both swagger and harmonic grace to his songs. “Colonel Paper” is more on the swagger end of things, with a big chunky riff that reminds of what Pollard and Gillard were up to during the Speak Kindly/Isolation Drills/Universal Truths era – inarguably a high point of the sprawling GBV discography. The lyrics are good, too: It’s a bit of surreal gross-out humor from Pollard, as he describes some weirdo eating cigarettes and trash straight out of the can.

Buy it from Amazon.