Guided By Voices - How Do You Spell Heaven (2017)

Guided By Voices is on a roll. One could argue that GBV is never not on a roll, that Robert Pollard's output plows past the word prolific like prolific is standing still in a snowbank and that's true, but this new version of the band (Doug Gillard, Bobby Bare Jr, Mark Shue, Kevin March) has given Pollard new tools to complement his song-hammer. Thus, ergo, quod erat demonstrandum: roll. Hot on the heels of the smothered-in-plaudits double album August By Cake comes this hot and heavy fifteen-tune long player, a melody-dense thwack to the earholes that will both energize and deplete your body of its remaining musicappreciation enzymes. Recorded by the band in New ork, and by Pollard in hio, How Do You Spell Heaven capitalizes on the current incarnation's tour-buffed shine without sacrificing eternal verities such as but not limited to off-kilter rhythmic olts krazy chords purposefully imperfect harmonies and fragmented structures that start and stop on a coin of small denomination and go somewhere else, and uickly. There's more, much more the easiest, laziest way to sum up this latest album is the most obvious How do you spell heaven Shout it from the rafters G-B-!