In the recent history of bands reuniting after a decade or more (think Pavement, the Pixies, the Police – and those are just the Ps,) Guided By Voices' mere six years away feels like an obligatory dash backstage before the encore. However, this particular iteration, billed as the "classic lineup," hadn't played together since 1996 and only reassembled to take part in Matador Records’ 21st anniversary celebration. Bob Pollard’s hair is grayer now and Tobin Sprout’s is thinner, but damn if Pollard can’t still hit those leg kicks; damn if Mitch Mitchell can’t still windmill through a chord with a cigarette hanging off his lip; damn if Greg Demos isn’t still wearing the same tight, striped pants he rocked fifteen years ago.
Which is not to say that Thursday’s show, aside from the illicit cigarette smoke, felt like a step back in time. For one, opener Times New Viking have too sophisticated an understanding of the last fifteen years of music to have played in the mid 90s. There’s a line of inheritance from GbV to Times New Viking, from Dayton to Columbus, but there’s another from Sonic Youth and another from Yo La Tengo that make them a natural fit for the Matador Records of today.
Whether or not the crowd recognized that or not is up for debate. It was clearly Guided by Voices’ party and Times New Viking’s biggest applause was when they announced that GbV was coming up next. A reunion tour is about the old connections, not making new ones, but Times New Viking didn’t exactly do themselves any favors either. Their set was too inward, barely acknowledging the raucous early crowd and seemingly too preoccupied with their own songs to care.
Conversely, Guided by Voices’ connection to their fans was instant, and they powered through tributes to times since passed, burying any of the original poignancy in the anthemic resonance that’s rushed to fill the space between the songs they wrote and the songs they have become. They knew what people expected to hear, and they obliged. After all, the band wasn’t getting back together for good; they were taking a victory lap through their catalogue, and that involves trading anticipation for familiarity and surprise for sentimentality.
Throughout the night, GbV didn’t stray far from the cluster of albums that marked their first run on Matador. It’s an era that never completely left their set, despite the frequent turnover in the backing bands that followed the classic lineup. Yet for the first time in years, the crowd was treated to Sprout’s contributions to those records (“Striped White Jets,” “Awful Bliss,”) and the reaction to those was as enthusiastic as anything they played all evening.
From “A Salty Salute” to “Smothered In Hugs,” GbV raised glass after glass to the good old days until the crowd was under the table, drunk on nostalgia. When Pollard introduced, “Don't Stop Now” from 1996’s Under the Bushes, Under the Stars, he called it “the ballad of Guided by Voices.” At that point in the evening, the band was still in the midst of the first of what would be multiple encores. They’d eventually have to stop, just as they did in 2004, but most everyone in the Crystal Ballroom was still reluctant to let them go – glad to have GbV back, if only for one night.
