Gold Star For Robot Boy.

While I'm definitely not a Guided By Voices obsessive, I have a serious soft spot in my heart for basically everything up until about the Mag Earwhig-era (I still haven't fully gotten over seeing Bob Pollard in a bright green "Ladies' Man"-style satin shirt on the Conan O'Brien show after Do The Collapse came out - totally shudder-inducing). I will also maintain that if you can listen to Bee Thousand & not fall in love with it, then you have a heart of stone, you cold, horrible person. This makes me extremely nostalgic for simple, low-budget 90s indie rock videos (complete with high kicks):



What triggered this post was reflecting upon the highs & lows of the 2007 music year, particularly the last ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead album & how they managed to rape my memories by covering/butchering Guided By Voices' "The Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory" (in the middle of what looked like a overly ambitious pseudo-concept album too, making it all the more inexplicable & out of place). As luck would have it, that Trail of Dead record actually came out in late 2006 & thus narrowly escaped earning a top spot on my 2007 shit-list. But that cover was so mind-blowingly awful that I'm going to call them out entirely on their own right now, exact release dates be damned. Attention, Trail of Dead: Stop adding cheesy, dramatic strings to songs that were beautiful & haunting precisely because they were originally so sparse & lo-fi. Please just go back to pretending to be a Sonic Youth tribute band.