By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Sons Of The Beard” is the best kind of Guided By Voices album closing track: a sprawling, epic prog masterpiece featuring multiple different sections, tempos, time signatures, and some scorching lead guitar work by Doug Gillard. There is nothing I don’t love about this song, so […]
Tag: Sweating The Plague
The Very Second
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “The Very Second” is a high-energy number on Sweating The Plague with not too much fancy guitar work going on for the rhythm guitar. But there is a fantastic guitar solo by Doug Gillard, as if you’d expect anything less than “fantastic” from him. You need […]
My Wrestling Days Are Over
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague On “My Wrestling Days Are Over,” Guided By Voices took a Psycho And The Birds approach to recording: the band used Robert Pollard’s original boombox demo as the main vocal and guitar track and then recorded additional guitar and synth overdubs to it. In my opinion, […]
Unfun Glitz
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Unfun Glitz” features a guitar technique frequently used by Robert Pollard that involves taking an entire chord shape and shifting it either up or down a string. In this case, he’s taking a simple “power chord” shape (consisting of the root note, the fifth note, and […]
Immortals
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Immortals” from Sweating The Plague is fairly simple to play on guitar. There are only a few chords and a quick riff to learn. According to Doug Gillard’s “Track By Track breakdown” of Sweating The Plague on Consequence Of Sound, the riff was sung by Robert […]
Downer
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Downer,” the opening track from Sweating The Plague, seemed to throw a few curveballs at us fans. It sounds unlike other Guided By Voices songs, with its backwards cymbal effects, guitar harmonics, and a Robert Pollard guitar technique I’m calling “Barre Four.” You need to be […]
Heavy Like The World
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Heavy Like The World” is one of two revamped Suitcase tracks on Sweating The Plague, along with “Your Cricket Is Rather Unique” (the original “Heavy Like The World” was titled “I’d Choose You” and appears on Suitcase 2: American Superdream Wow). Another trait they share is […]
Ego Central High
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague There’s certainly no shortage of riff-heavy rockers on Sweating The Plague; and while “Ego Central High” lands precisely into that category, it also has an anthemic quality both in music and lyrics. When Robert Pollard sings, “Here’s a fight song for everyone,” I just imagine a […]
Street Party
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Street Party” was one of the original working titles of the album Sweating The Plague, so it’s kind of nice to be able to hear the song that inspired that idea. The song “Street Party” opens with an acoustic guitar strumming an A major chord, but […]
Your Cricket Is Rather Unique
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague It’s hardly unusual for a member of Guided By Voices other than Robert Pollard to handle vocal duties for a song or two. Tobin Sprout performed vocals for the many songs he contributed to the band during his time, and Nick Mitchell sang his own tunes on […]
