Guided by Voices

In 1994, 38-year-old school teacher Robert Pollard & his merry band recorded Bee Thousand in a Dayton, Ohio, basement on a 4-track cassette recorder. This improbable rock classic became an enormously influential album: Pitchfork and Spin have called it one of the best records of the ’90s, and Amazon picked Bee Thousand as #1 on their list of the 100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums Of All Time. A legendary live band with a rabid following, the Washington Post called GBV “the Grateful Dead equivalent for people who like Miller Lite instead of acid!” With 10 studio albums already under their belts in less than 5 years, the band’s present-day line-up is nothing less than a new Golden Age of GBV.

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There have been rumblings for years amongst ardent fans about Versus working on a sci-fi concept album. The band had essentially disappeared from the public eye since releasing 2010’s On the Ones and Threes, until the excellent Ex Nihilo EP materialized in 2019 on a new label, Ernest Jenning Record Co. (having previously worked with Teen-beat, Caroline, and Merge), unveiling the nascent stages of this direction. Now, the apocrypha has officially been dispelled with the new LP, Ex Voto, also released in 2019, also on EJRC. A discussion with the band’s frontman Richard Baluyut reveals allusions to science fiction and spirituality, equally arcane and universal.