I searched around a bit and only saw a few isolated references to GBV on here, which really surprised me given that exploring GBV's discography has at times felt like discovering a treasure trove of lost golden-era pillows music. Mind you, it'd do the sheer variety of their music a massive disservice to pidgeonhole all of it like that, but I've always felt like this is a band that pillows fans ought to know about.
For the uninitiated, GBV have been recording in some form or another since the late 70s and are still releasing mass quantities of music today. Their style tends to be a scattershot mixture of instantly memorable "hits" and intentionally obtuse oddities that take a few listens before they start making any sense. They share some major influences with the pillows, and it shows in some of their music. They were also good friends with Kim Deal and the Breeders in the mid-90s, and shared or worked together on several songs.
While they're primarily associated with their lo-fi home-recorded albums of the early 90s like [i]Bee Thousand[/i], Robert Pollard and company have released a massive amount of music as GBV and as numerous sideprojects, covering a wide spread from [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MTzCxFlT8g]Bivouac-esque rock[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9xj2hiojGk]lo-fi power pop[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZIi97N5sFM]progressive rock[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9HX-yZYIo]pretty acoustic tunes[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWmUhfk8RBI]post-punk[/url], and more. (And when I say "a massive amount of music", I do mean massive -- Pollard released five albums in the last year alone, and that's not even slightly atypical.)
Their 2001 album [i]Isolation Drills[/i] is probably the easiest starting place for a pillows fan. It's consciously more homogenous in its sound than would often be expected from a Robert Pollard release, but it's easily accessible, full of great tunes, and to my ears it often sounds like it could've been a pillows album released circa 1999. [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV4b9SNZkU4]Fair Touching[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oev6552Oujc]Pivotal Film[/url]
[i]Universal Truths and Cycles[/i] and [i]Class Clown Spots a UFO[/i] are good album picks for digging a bit deeper; they cover much larger stylistic grounds, but get further away from the pillows comparison (and might be less immediately accessible in general). [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSDgmRaI7qQ]Billy Wire[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsHBi9RUppY]Storm Vibrations[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek2z012TX-g]Tyson's High School[/url]
I linked all the style mentions above to songs, btw.
A few other picks: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_okvPiIeOI]The Main Street Wizards[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlZlst4NBVw]Game of Pricks[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u30i19DhXxc]Don't Stop Now[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKsPHJNjnBU]My Thoughts Are A Gas[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtBlkNh32UA]Perfect This Time[/url], [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvSJlLOGR40]There Are Other Worlds[/url]
Despite the fact that I've barely scratched the surface, I ought to quit now before I've linked all of the remaining 1500+ songs in Pollard's discography, though it is very tempting.
Anybody else here a fan of them?
