Universal Truths and Cycles

Guided By Voices: Robert Pollard, Doug Gillard, Nate Farley, Tim Tobias, Jon McCann.
Additional personnel includes: Helen Yee (violin); Asha Mevlana (viola); Steve Berson (cello); Chris Slusarenko (piano); Todd Tobias (keyboards).
Recorded at Cro Magnon Enterprises, Dayton, Ohio; Waterloo Sound Studios, Kent, Ohio.
Personnel: Helen Yee (violin); Scott Bennett, Chris George (cello); Chris Slusarenko (piano).
Recording information: Cro Magnon Enterprises, Dayton, OH; Waterloo Sound Recordings, Kent, OH.
Photographer: Daniel Coston.
When an accomplished and venerated band releases an album which could be referred to as its umpteenth release, often the phrase "more of the same" is derisively bandied about. However, while this could be said about Guided By Voices on UNIVERSAL TRUTHS & CYCLES the meaning is subverted. For GBV (really Robert Pollard and whoever he decides to work with on a given album) "more of the same" could be just about anything from experimental indie rock (BEE THOUSAND) to prog rock (MAG EARWHIG!) to more poppy material (DO THE COLLAPSE). The constant is ingenious, dynamic unpredictability.
On the opening track, Pollard exhorts "sit up and beg for slivers of language," and UNIVERSAL CYCLES & TRUTHS, like many a preceding GBV album, offers up a plethora of (mostly) succinct songs secreting smidgens of taut language, observations, abstract stories, and witticisms, backed by a musical topography which alters as frequently as a cityscape. Songs vary from the distortion drive of the all-too-brief "Love 1" to the imploring arena-rock ballad "Storm Vibration" and on to the pop puffery of "Pretty Bombs," which would have XTC fawning over its Beatles-esque wanderings. UNIVERSAL TRUTHS & CYCLES continues the inventiveness which has earned GBV its role as tribal elders of the indie rock world.