专辑简介

by Stephen Thomas ErlewineRobert Pollard pulled the plug on Guided by Voices in 2004, but by that point many fans won over by the band ten years earlier had long stopped paying attention. And who could blame them? Sometime around 1999, just when GBV leapfrogged from Matador to TVT and made their second attempt at a big rock record, Pollard's solo albums started piling up at an alarmingly rapid rate, along with box sets of GBV outtakes presented under invented band names. Sure, the solo records, billed as part of the never-ending Fading Captain series, were intended to be a clearing-house for experimental material that couldn't quite fit on the increasingly streamlined GBV albums, but the sheer avalanche of material wound up seeming like little more than white noise to those unwilling to devote nearly all their free time to sorting out the minutia within Pollard's vast, cumbersome discography. It also didn't help that despite all this music, it didn't seem that Pollard was taking great leaps forward: instead, he was refining and sharpening the blueprint introduced to the world at large with 1994's Bee Thousand, the record that saw him catapult out of Dayton, OH, and into the realm of cult legend. Legendary status suited Pollard well, but his ceaseless productivity diminished his status, pushing him to the fringes of the fringes of indie rock. He could have existed there forever, but he wanted to break out of the band -- or at least, he wanted to jump-start his career, to bring disenchanted listeners back into the fold by breaking up the band and giving his career a fresh start. And so, From a Compound Eye, roughly his eighth solo album, but the first that was consciously intended for a wider audience. Although it was released in January 2006, the album had been completed for a long time, since the waning days of GBV, and saved until 2006, when an appropriate amount of breathing time had passed between the band's demise and the launch of a solo career -- enough time to make those listeners who had long ago given up on the band interested again, with the solo album, band biography, and DVD of the final concert all hitting the stores within a month of each other. For the hardcore, the fact that this album was designed as Pollard's first ever, long-awaited genuine double album -- constructed and sequenced as if its 26 songs were spread over four vinyl sides -- was supposed to be the selling point, along with its heavily hyped pre-release buzz on the Internet (as well as Jim Greer's official biography).... Read More...