power-pop

Doug Gillard has spent most of his career as someone else’s guitarist. Guided by Voices, currently. Nada Surf, Cobra Verde, Death of Samantha, plus a long list of collaborations that reads like a who’s who of American indie rock. The consummate sideman.

Parallel Stride is only his fourth album under his own name, and his first since 2014’s Parade On. It’s also his best.

The lineage is exactly what you’d expect from the bands he’s kept company with: The Who, Big Star, the Kinks, the Raspberries, Teenage Fanclub. Opener “Face of Smiles” leans hard into that last one, a warm rhythm strum and wistful turn in the melody. Gillard handled the arrangements and most of the instruments himself, recorded across a few years, and the dedication and assurance shows through.

“Saving My Life Every Day” and “Cannons” are the ones that grab you first, big-hearted and immediate, the hooks that pull you in on a single listen. Then the other nine do the rest of the work of convincing you to stay. A guitarist’s guitarist, finally pointing the songs at himself.

Power pop is back. Again. I wish we tracked its rises and falls the way we do the successive named waves of emo (people tried, then lost count; the Wikipedia page gamely attempts a taxonomy and gives up), but instead I’ll just be pleased the albums keep arriving.

The last few years have been good ones: Sharp Pins, This Is Lorelei, Good Flying Birds. Co-produced by Teenage Fanclub’s Gerard Love in Edwyn Collins’ studio, Just A Day has its bona fides in order. This is the substrain that runs on chiming guitars, bubbling organ, transatlantic vocals and stacked harmonies. They’ve dropped the horns and pedal steel of earlier records and, lovely as those were, the stripped-back four-piece is the better sound.

It isn’t pure pre-millennial Glaswegiana, though. There are more ambitious moments here, and the band hasn’t shed its cosmic Americana entirely; I caught the Flying Burrito Brothers more than once. A summer record, then. Long live the genre.

Bob Pollard’s 44th album as GBV (solo records and side projects not included; nobody has the time). Familiarity might ordinarily breed contempt, but it never has with Pollard. Each album adds something, gives someone a new way in. There have been many eras of GBV, and this one, a decade or so deep with Gillard, Bare Jr., Shue and March, is among the strongest.

When I reviewed Broken Social Scene’s Remember the Humans I said not to expect anything wildly different, just an excellent BSS record. Pollard works at the opposite extreme of productivity, but the principle is the same: you know roughly what to expect, and reliability is sometimes better than reinvention. The danger is taking it for granted. They won’t be around forever.

Or will they? The record keeps circling its own story without quite admitting to it. “We outlast them all” is classic GBV power pop; Pollard insists it’s about anyone who perseveres, not the band, though good luck hearing it that way. Then “Out With a Theory” gives the actual autobiography, a covers act writing Cheap Trick knock-offs and dreaming of recording in Mitch Easter’s garage, and he calls that one the ballad of GBV’s history. Deflection and confession, two tracks apart.