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Robert Pollard takes a stroll down memory lane with these two releases; a box set of previously unreleased songs from the past 15 years (Suitcase 3) and a career-spanning DVD masked as a video-collage given the lovely title of The Devil Went Home And Puked.
Let's start with Suitcase 3, which features over 100 previously unreleased songs from the mid-1990's up through the current day. The thought of 100 unreleased Robert Pollard songs is both an exciting and scary one: The fan-boy part of you wants to hear all these new songs, but the cynic in you has to wonder why these songs were never released, especially when considering that Pollard can often be good for five or more albums a year. Well, it turns out you should listen to your inner cynic on this one. Unreleased they may be, but many of these tracks are just sloppy demos that were often poorly written, or poorly performed or poorly recorded - and sometimes all three. The worst offender is the fourth disc, an acoustic jam sessions with Pollard, Tobin Sprout and Greg Demos from somewhere back around the band's 1994-1995 peak. Sounds promising, but the songs were actually made up on the spot and, as you can probably guess, are unlistenable. That being said, there is roughly an EP's worth of good material sprinkled through discs 1-3. Also, as is the custom with these Suitcase sets, each track is credited to a fake band with a witty name like The Jubilant Toy Soldiers, Royal Canadian Custard and Necklace of Warts.
The Devil Went Home and Puked is an hour long DVD video collage with snippets of Guided By Voices and other Pollard projects' live shows spliced together and interspersed with various home videos, news clips, and whatever other video footage Pollard probably thought was funny after a few beers. The live stuff is the most interesting thing here, but the video camera footage is rather poor visually and the audio is muddy on a lot of the performances. Just take a look at the blurry still pictures on the cover (complete with video camera date/time stamp in the lower right-hand corner) and you'll get an idea of what you're up against. As a bonus, the DVD includes nine videos from various Pollard projects, none of which are all that great, although the video for "Winston's Atomic Bird" from The Boston Spaceships has some charmingly lo-fi animation, with images appropriated from Yellow Submarine and Star Wars.
Both of these should be considered for hardcore fans with expendable income only.
DAVID MANSDORF
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