TVT

Regardless of what you've heard, this album kills. Many speculated that it would sound like The Cars, or Oasis, or otherwise be some neutered big-budget perversion of GbV's galaxy of brilliance in the indie ghetto. Is it slicker and easier on the ear? You bet. Is it more likely to hook in listeners who think "lo-fi" is a town in California that CCR wrote about? Probably. But it's still unmistakably Guided By Voices from top to bottom, a document that should prove to be every bit as important to the saga as something like Vampire On Titus. Why? Because it's the sound Robert Pollard has heard in his head all along: anthems fit to carom around the most Nugent of basketball arenas, tempered with shiver-perfect melodies and that unconscious, guileless weirdness that is GbV's intangible edge.

The only logical place to start is "Teenage FBI." A dusty gem plucked from vinyl-only obscurity to lead off Do The Collapse, it's the track that best illustrates producer Ric Ocasek's handiwork. Gussied up with parping synths, a heroic Doug Gillard guitar solo, and an all-over molten shower of crunch, the track is one three-minute-long hook. It would make a milkman whistle. Hit potential also resides with "Hold On Hope," an honest-to-goodness ballad with one of Pollard's most aching melodies and a classy, subtly-employed string arrangement. The lyrics even make linear sense, save maybe for that bit about the cowboy.

The remainder of Do The Collapse is a feast of densely-textured, finely-tuned pop-rock long on both obvious payoffs and obscured pleasures. For every "Surgical Focus" or "Strumpet Eye"--driving pop songs that canter out of the speakers like young deer--there is a "Mushroom Art," "Zoo Pie," or "Picture Me Big Time"--songs that butt tough guitar dissonance and queasy, creaking structures up against startling breakouts of soaring melody. Even the grinding abstraction of "In Stitches" halts midway through for a delicate interlude direct from the proggy mists of Pollard's brain. Spread that feel out over an entire song and you get the pastoral revelation of "Wormhole." Blow it up with guitars and you have the gripping, robot warfare headtrip of "Optical Hopscotch."

Still, there's more. Devotees of huge, churning megarock will crank "Much Better Mr. Buckles"; those who wanted to hear GbV's take on '77 punk will adore the minute-long "An Unmarketed Product" (a sly lyrical comment on the group's tentative steps toward the major label ratrace couched in revved guitars); lovers of trademark GbV acoustic instamatics have the surrealist ditty "Dragons Awake"; "Wrecking Now" is a tender, string-laced confection for those who fantasized of a GbV with George Martin at the board. And no veteran of '80s FM will be able to resist "Liquid Indian," a thrilling cut that somehow sounds like the Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way" shot out of a howitzer.

Do The Collapse is GbV's major label debut (though I still have a hard time consdiering TVT a major) and understandably exists under harsher scrutiny than Alien Lanes or Mag Earwhig! ever had to suffer. Big money production + big money promotion = big time pressure for the band to break big. Or does it? I don't think anyone in the TVT/GbV camp honestly expects "Teenage FBI" to find a niche between Celine Dion and Korn in the unrelentingly ugly climate of Top 40. Look instead to Pavement, Sebadoh, or Liz Phair, all contemporaries of GbV who have made the jump to majors pretty much successfully and without diluting their vision. If Do The Collapse is to be judged by any standards other than the terrific music within its grooves, it should be those.

Best to forget all this new producer/big label yap and just put on those headphones. Do The Collapse is an expertly-rendered classic, the sort of disc your infinite-repeat button was born for.

--Lane Hewitt