Do The Collapse

Each successive Guided By Voices release since 1994\'s \"Bee Thousand\" has altered the approach in subtle ways. This time it was to employ the Cars\' Ric Ocasek as their producer and allow him to do for them what he had previously done for Weezer. And, sure enough, the blurry echo-plexes of the past are stripped away (or lessened) for the cleaner, tighter punch of higher fidelity. No longer hiding behind either lo-fi cassette tape hiss or a defiantly muddy production from a fellow indie-rocker, GBV deliver their hooks straight up. \"Teenage FBI,\" \"Zoo Pie,\" and \"Things I Will Keep\" all flow past with a serious intensity, the guitars crunching with powerchords, the drums snapping choruses into line, harmonies piling up like so much power-pop traffic. As Pollard\'s prolific nature and his refusal to edit create a near overload of song, it\'s a nice variation to hear the vocals so clear, as \"Hold On Hope\" comes across like a sincere Matthew Sweet ballad. It\'s these small surprises that keep the loyalists coming back for more.

Check out our album review of Artist's Do The Collapse on Rolling Stone.com.

One school of thought regarding Guided By Voices considers the band in their element with a four-track, turning out impressionist albums of fragmented, mini-pop songs.