šŸ”„ Hot Freaks: the Guided By Voices Listening Club (Final results time! 40 album ranking list! Freedom! - post 2160)

Aye, 2021 was a good year for em imo!

And weā€™re into 2021 with EARTH MAN BLUES

First ever listen of this for me. Seems fun, very loose and easy

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Here is the review for Earth Man Blues over at the Earful ā€˜O Wax GBV fan blog

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This is going to be interesting - I remember really enjoying EMB at the time, and yet for some reason I didnā€™t care for it much when I revisited it a few months ago.

This might be a rare example of me going cold on a GBV album over time (usually the opposite is the case), but Iā€™ll give it a few spins this week to find out!

Ah wicked! Would like to be hearing it again for the first time!

I think that shows how strong a lot of the tracks are even if the record doesnā€™t hang together massively well. I voted for the ballads. But I totally dig the big rockers on it too.

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and then the cynical view is that itā€™s consistently decent without any real standouts :wink:

think nowadays I really want a few gems to get stuck in my head more than an all-round solid album which doesnā€™t quite take off (imho) so feel like a bunch of this era of albums might suffer from the same shoulder-shrug from me. But ofc very happy to be proved wrong

also quite funny that GBV are probs my fav band ever, yet I find myself voting under the average score on quite a few albums! maybe im just a harsh prick

Starting to get caught up

Mirrored Aztec isnā€™t as weak as I remembered, at the time I had high expectations coming off Poppy Field, an album I really liked, so it felt very frustrating and disappointing that they lost that newfound momentum again immediately.

Listening back now, itā€™s not bad to be fair, some decent tunes, nice sound/production. Itā€™s just quite by-the-numbers really and even the standout tracks arenā€™t really huge classics that stick in the memory. If they released this in say 2017 I might have thought a bit more fondly of it but it comes at a time when the weariness has very much set in so itā€™s harder to be charitable. Feel like that might be a recurring theme going forward from here.

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congrats, your vote just relegated Please Be Honest back to last place!

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Weirdly Please Be Honest probably is worse than Mirrored Aztec in most senses and yet Iā€™d be far more inclined to stick it on

Bored Jurgen Klopp GIF by Liverpool FC

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Same here I think. Although theyā€™re very different vibes.

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I guess theyā€™re just more interesting when theyā€™re ā€˜badā€™ than when theyā€™re just very average

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Tobinā€™s Starfire just popped on autoplay there, instantly checked to see what it was as it sounded like just my thing :smiley: lovely tune

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The piano version from his recent rarities disc?

nah just the standard version, but didnā€™t instantly recognise it until his voice came in (Youtube played it after listening to a Michael Head track, fit well)

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Ah, nice. Such a tune :slight_smile:

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Enjoyed my first revisit to EMB this morning, plenty to like IMO. Dunno why I had such a weird downer on it last year, mustā€™ve been in a bad mood that day!

One or two songs are let down by Bobā€™s odd vocal choices though e.g. How Can A Plumb Be Perfected? and especially The Disconnected Citizen.

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