November 11, 1999
What is it about a brilliant melody that eliminates all rational thought? Looked at lyrically, "We all live in a Yellow Submarine" is ridiculously infantile, but just my having mentioned that will have you humming it until Saturday. The Beatles comparison is perfectly apt - although Robert Pollard (the prime mover of Guided By Voices) plies a brand of defiantly lo-fi indie crunch that is miles away from the Fab Four's polished studio craft, his affection for 60's pop and extraordinary way with seemingly offhand melodies that lodge like burrs in the fuzzy wool sweater of your cerebral cortex puts him squarely in the musical shadow cast by Liverpool's grimy skyline. I may never know what Pollard is talking about when he says "Parallel lines on a slow decline, tractor rape chain", but I'll have that sweet melody in my head until I'm returned to the dust from whence I came. There's more where that came from: "Queen of Cans and Jars", "Kicker of Elves", "I am A Scientist", "Echoes Myron" - hey, don't ask me what it's all about, it'll distract me from gleefully singing along.
Bee Thousand is stylistically all over the map, from the aforementioned Beatles-outtakes to abbreviated anthem rock to punkish bursts, but as Madonna's wardrobe has shown, the refusal to adhere to any one style is a style unto itself. Willful refusal to be pigeonholed is always admirable, and when the results are as consistently bright, charming and tuneful as this there's no complaining allowed. Miraculously, each song is roughly 2 minutes long, just enough to establish a personality but short enough to leave you desperate to play it again. And really, the whole album is like that; 20 alcoholic songs in 36 addictive minutes. Bee Thousand is catchy like Ebola, has more pop than Coca-Cola. Listen to it twice and you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.
- Jared O’Connor
"I am an incurable/
and nothing else
behaves like me"