Review Summary: "Just waiting for sundown
So as to be not found"
All things considered, “Vampire on Titus” isn’t a lost masterpiece. It isn’t some cutthroat-rare vinyl to get ahold of and treasure privately, and it isn’t a must-hear forgotten relic from the early years of a now-formidable band. All things considered, it isn’t an essential document of music history. It is not required listening in either the anthropology of indie, or the daunting glut of Guided by Voices albums out there already, with the sure promise of many more to come this year alone. All things considered, “Vampire on Titus” shouldn’t be an important album.
Except it is…
Released in 1993, in that sour spot between the band’s first proper blip on the listeners’ radar (“Propeller”), and their first tour de force (“Bee Thousand”), “Vampire on Titus” is as obscure as a Guided by Voices record can be. At a minute longer than a meager half-hour, it’s a collection you can take in while browsing a store, waiting for the metro, chatting up a friend or doing a myriad other inane daily activities. It’s approximately eighteen minutes shorter than the average length of a cable show episode, and three minutes shorter than the daily average time a person spends reading. And so it’s all too easy to miss that this is the album where Guided by Voices found their sound.
Steeped in lo-fi aesthetic, and decidedly modest, from production down to the cover art, “Vampire” is the root of Guided by Voices as they are today. Evenly split between dismayed rockers, short acoustic ditties and occasional noisy oddballs, by 1994’s “Bee Thousand,” the band would hone this framework to the point of perfection.
In media res is how Guided by Voices have been operating for decades now, and “Vampire” isn’t much different. Most of these songs sound like a private moment the listener has wandered into halfway through, and then skulked back out before it’s ended.
Pollard’s voice is buried so deep in the mix on opener “Wished I Was a Giant,” that he sounds like a man screaming from the bottom of a pit. The instruments bash away, almost shouldering him out completely, so that when his vocals do power through, he sounds despairing, at the end of a tether. It’s a smart little touch, and it makes the song entirely different from a straightforward plea it would have been otherwise.
“Vampire” captures Pollard ditching the raspy punk yelp he’d stirred “Propeller” with, and settle into the fractured croon that would dominate all his following records. And if his singing style has always walked a close path to Beatles-esque harmonies, on this brawny collection, the band sound more like The Who than anything else. It’s only appropriate, since this album would get as eclipsed by its successor, as “The Who Sell Out” was by the cataclysmic “Tommy.”
The full-bodied cuts, “Dusted” and “Sot,” are the ones that made it through the colossal critical success of “Bee Thousand” and the token respect that followed their next few albums. These are the songs that still make an occasional appearance on the band’s current set-lists. And while they’re certainly more developed and assured than most of “Vampire,” they aren’t the album’s best by a stretch.
“What About It?” is a terse little noise rock pebble, their first stab at future staples like “Hot Freaks” and “Auditorium.” ”Jar of Cardinals” is the template for a thousand Guided by Voices tunes to follow, a spare chiming guitar, and Pollard singing, his voice tender and anxious at once. And “Gleemer” just may be their finest moment, so languishing and exposed, that it seems carved out of raw nerve.
This album got unfortunately lost in the band’s shuffle. It’s logical enough why. It was just too wimpy when compared to “Propeller’s” buzzing desperation, and too underwhelming when put against what would follow. It’s a shame to say the least, because “Vampire” is the point of formation of Pollard’s and Sprout’s sound, the start of an incredibly prolific run, one that would see them casually tossing off brilliant songs by the ostensive hour, seemingly bulletproof, shaping the backbone of indie in more vital ways than they’ve ever been given credit for. Even now, with their legacy in stable check, Guided by Voices tend to trail Pavement, Pixies and Dino Jr. when someone starts listing off the granddaddies of the genre.
But they were the impish golden children of the underground back then, older than their peers, and all the more havoc-prone and snotty for it. They always seemed more at ease with the obscurity that plagued most of the indie movement, taking great pleasure in the puritan work ethic being an unknown brought, in both recording and touring. Lo-fi, pop, noise, drone, DIY, garage and a hat-ful of other genres all got unceremoniously mashed and distilled by them into this album, a formula that the band would stick to for decades to come.
In many ways, they still sustain these anarchic tendencies better than most punk luminaries did in the 80’s. Their sloppiness has never been a sign of diffidence or apathy, and that intentionally ascetic approach to recording is captured best in this instant. Though “Bee Thousand” was by no means a beacon of high fidelity, it seems a crafted porcelain doll compared to the roughshod and muddy fits of “Vampire”. This may not be their best by a long shot, but Guided by Voices were never as pressing, as uprooted or as fearless as they were here.
