Guided By Voices - Thick Rich And Delicious (2025) (Hi-Res)

Some of the most revered Guided by Voices albums are the ones where songwriter Robert Pollard is able to balance his proclivities for strangeness with his gifts for melody and hooks. The reconfiguration of GbV that's been responsible for record after record (usually at least two a year) in the 2010s and 2020s has often leaned more toward the strange side of things, with a high number of the many tunes they churn out exploring prog rock or experimental song structures. Thick Rich and Delicious, the band's second full-length of 2025, is the album GbV fans who miss the band's more tuneful, pop-friendly days have been waiting for. These 15 songs are primarily energetic power pop, rich with catchy melodies, high-spirited vocal harmonies, and the type of sticky choruses Pollard has used sparingly on the albums directly preceding this. Songs like "A Tribute to Beatle Bob" or "Lucy's World" are almost too straightforwardly melodic, with huge, happy major-key chord progressions and hummable tunes. The band rocks out on riffy selections like the instrumental "Ozark Ivanho" and the garage punk of "Replay," and there's some woozy Who-like experimentalism on "Mother John," but by and large, Thick Rich and Delicious is all about pop. It's powerful power pop, too, with the band tracking the entire album live, with cranked amps direct to analog tape. The nostalgic effect of a Guided by Voices record this melodic seems not to be lost on the band

"The Lighthouse Resurrection" contains a callback to '90s GbV tune "At Odds with Dr. Genius," a lyric or two of which made it into an interlude on the band's widely celebrated 1994 album Bee Thousand. Thick Rich and Delicious doesn't aspire to return to any of Pollard or the band's former selves, but it's a fantastic reminder of the side of GbV that's been underrepresented on some of their 2010s/2020s records: their ability to make fun, rambunctious rockers that are easy to sing along to.

© Fred Thomas

Tracklist
1. Babies and Gentlemen (01:20)
2. (You Can't Go Back To) Oxford Talawanda (02:35)
3. Phantasmagoric Upstarts (02:52)
4. Lucy's World (02:36)
5. Our Man Syracuse (02:28)
6. Mother John (02:38)
7. Dance of the Picnic Ants (01:27)
8. Xeno Urban (03:21)
9. A Tribute to Beatle Bob (02:46)
10. Replay (02:41)
11. Siren (02:37)
12. The Lighthouse Resurrection (02:12)
13. A. Glum Swoboda (03:26)
14. Ozark Ivanho (01:14)
15. Captain Kangaroo Won the War (03:09)