Guided By Voices: Do The Collapse : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Ever since Guided By Voices became the toasts of indie rock with their masterwork, Bee Thousand, in 1994, frontman Robert Pollard has been replicating that album's short-songs, cruddy-production formula to the point that his songwriting quirks have curdled into mannered cliches. Perhaps sensing that even his loyalists have grown tired of everything coming out half-baked and low-fi, Pollard has created an album of fully formed compositions produced in pristine digital sound by former Cars leader Ric Ocasek. It's all a bit startling at first -- like hearing the band with 3-D glasses on -- but Ocasek's polished power boost serves GBV well. The arena-rock riffs on "Teenage FBI" and "In Stitches" leap out at you, and the weepy strings on "Hold On Hope" and "Dragons Awake" work in a Forever Changes kind of way. Longtime fans may bristle at GBV's new slick tricks, but Do the Collapse is hardly a concession to commercialism. Rather, it sounds like the GBV record that unreconstructed classic-rock fan Pollard has always wanted to make: his very own Who Are You.