Waterloo Records and Tapes

  GUIDED BY VOICES - Please Be Honest  - Guided By Voices 2016 release from the veteran alt-rock/indie outfit. Robert Pollard wrote and recorded and played all the instruments on Please Be Honest , and when he finished, it felt to him like a Guided By Voices  record. He's not wrong. The songs are compact and tuneful, the playing expertly slack, the production raw and unpolished: sounds pretty much like every review of Bee Thousand.  A better cognate, however, might be Vampire on Titus, Pollard's 1993 pre-Bee Thousand lo-fi tour de force. On that record, Pollard similarly played every instrument-though his drumming skills then were so rudimentary that he had to record the bass drum and the snare parts separately, which is no longer the case-and as with everything he does, it's about the songs, man. Of which Please Be Honest has no shortage, fifteen of them clocking in at just over 33 minutes. The point being there's precedent for a GBV record wh