Customer Reviews

Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's 100 songs, on four CD's and I really hate to be the first reviewer to say... Proceed with caution. This is a significant investment in GBV material and I advise it to be your final GBV purchase, in other words own everything els first and if you must have more, you've got 15 GBV CD's and you still need more, then at that point you're ready. Presently I own and enjoy virtually every redily available GBV CD (there are a few I still need) but I think at last count, including Robert Pollard solo stuff, I'm at 18 discs. So I am no casual listener. I repeat, proceed with caution...

'Suitcase', unlike most box sets, isn't a stuck-together mess of previously released material draped with a few sprigs of 'rarities' - even if you're a hardcore GBV acolyte you won't have heard most of this stuff before. Tracks are culled from bizarrely abandoned LP projects, drunken jam sessions (those who enjoyed the maniac abandon of the 'Grand Hour' will find some real nuggets here) and basement poetry that stretches back over 20 years. Much has been made of Bob Pollard's inability to stop writing but if these are outtakes then the man may aswell wipe 'quality control' from his dictionary - many songwriters would sell their soul to be able to dash down such casual classics as 'Supermarket The Moon' and 'I'm Cold' or replicate the poise of 'On Short Wave'. You may have been dithering about adding it to your collection. Fear not, this has been well worth waiting for...

i will depart from the tone set by the reviewers before me. i will automatically assume that anyone interested in buying this box set is already a fan. why would someone shell out the money for this (slightly) pricey set if they didnt already love guided by voices?
that being said, all thats left to say is WOW. i am in lo-fi heaven. some songs make me jump up and down, and others make me cry. there are a couple of unremarkable songs, but i disagree firmly with anyone who says this box set could have been cut down to 2 cds. there are way more great songs than there are "bad" ones (i hesitate to call anything of robert pollard's bad) if youre thinking about buying the set, just do it. where is the risk? if you dont like it you can always sell it back on amazon.
by the way i am listening to it right now. i cant seem to listen to anything else since i got it a few weeks ago. *sigh* robert pollard plucks at the pleasure center of my brain with his hauntingly beautiful lo-fi melodies. was there ever a band that comes even close to the genius of guided by voices? no, of course not.

...and maybe only a cd's worth of useless stuff. Definitely not for the beginning GBV fan, but plenty of fine material here. Every time I play these, usually one after another in the car, I hear some great songs I missed the previous times. There's quite a bit to slowly digest here! Necessary for any hardcore GBV fan.

how can anyone write so many great songs? c'mon people, plunk down the forty-five stinking bucks and experience the unearthly genius of robert pollard. if you are already a fan, there is no excuse to NOT have this. as one might expect, this is not the starters place to look. bee thousand, alien lanes or the safer(more NORMAL sounding) isolation drills would be the best choices.

nice packaging, good booklet. excellent liner notes. pick your favorite 20 or 25 songs and make the ultimate GbV disc. what a joy the suitcase is.

"Suitcase" is, like everyone else said, not for newbies to GbV. It's probably not even for some diehards. A few too many of the "songs" are half-baked fragments that are too low-fi for even me, and I love GbV's earlier work represented in "Box" and pre-"Alien Lanes" albums. There are still many gems -- probably about half the songs here are typically bright and shiny pop gems -- but it could've easily been culled down to 2 CDs instead of 4. Don't expect greatness, and definitely try to find it marked down from its original price a little. An interesting artifact for GbV fans in the end.

It may take you a few years to really crack this gem of a box set, but it's worth it. I've owned it for 5 years now and I love each disc like it's a lost GBV album, and I discover new songs to obsess over literally every time I listen. Some of my favorite songs are on here.

If you love GBV and are a giant nerd you'll find a lot to love here. And you won't regret your purchase (eventually).

Fan club product? Perhaps. There are great songs on this and Suitcase II, and also tossed off lo-fi *recordings* that bring you as much into the basement recordings as being part of early GbV. If you have a bunch of Bob related material and listen to it again and again, then you already understand what this is. You get it. You will need this eventually, but it will be out of print by then. If you don't own Hardcore UFOs yet, get that first. Then buy Suitcases I & II together, all the EPs you don't already own, all the new Robert Pollard, and find the torrents for the live boards and so on.... Ruin your lives. Oh, and if you haven't picked up a turntable and started collecting vinyl again, see ya.

How in the world can this package exist? These guys, leader Robert Pollard in particular, release something like 100 tracks in any given year, and most of them sound like they were rushed out without too much regard for polish or perfection, so how could there have been another 100 tracks sitting around unused? This 4-CD set comprises exactly 100 tracks, 25 per disk, of songs that were lying around, overlooked, tossed aside or didn't seem to fit properly elsewhere. Like I said, though, I just don't get the logic of it, since virtually all GBV disks sound like a random assortment of stuff that was, well, lying around. The main difference is that this box is even more disjointed than most GBV albums, as it contains leftovers and out-takes from what certainly must be one of the most haphazard catalogs of all time. The glue that holds it together (albeit tenuously) is the fertile mind of Robert Pollard, who tosses out song ideas and melodies like Keebler makes cookies. The point, though, is whether or not it's worth your time and money to invest in this and spend time with it. The answer is....maybe.
Guided By Voices are the real Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players. Their audience is limited to those who can sit through impossibly dense, apparently unfocused rants in order to locate the bits that penetrate through the fog. Not everybody can do this, or would want to bother. I buy and listen to things like this so that you don't have to. I suffer for you. As a fan, I was compelled to immerse myself in this box. I was hoping for an embarrassment of riches, but must say that an awful lot of this collection is simply an embarrassment. The box's subtitle can be taken quite literally and if nothing else, represents truth in advertising - "Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft." The quality ranges from the excellent to incredibly bad. On the bad side, half-baked ideas share space with horrendous, unlistenable trash; If I never hear "Hold On to Yesterday" or "Big Trouble" again, I will consider myself lucky. That's unfortunate, though, because they sit side by side with some truly great (although very raw) stuff, like "I'm Cold", "In Walked the Moon" and "Wondering Boy Poet". I'm convinced that some other band could make a good living simply by polishing up songs like these and re-releasing them. GBV could do it themselves, but it's all too obvious that they are far too busy just trying to keep up with themselves as it is.
The truth is that most of this never should have seen the light of day, at least not for mass market release, but GBV aren't really for the mass market, so there's the conundrum. If the best bits were compiled onto one disk, this would be a great collection. But it's four disks, and the bad stuff is so f*&%ing horrible that it makes it impossible to recommend this box to anyone except fellow GBV obsessives and the socially deprived, especially since it retails at over $50.00. For that money, I'd suggest buying any three of their single CD releases instead. Either that or form a band, learn these songs by heart, and give them the attention to detail that they deserve.
B- Tom Ryan

The no longer mythical songs from Pollard's suitcase are finally released. And while there are definitely enough great tracks on the 100-song set, it's not exactly the indie-rock salvation you might be looking for.