Guided By Voices, "The Unsinkable Fats Domino"
If you see any large-hearted, graying-haired gentleman wearing striped pants or American-flag print fun-shirts today, playing windmill air-guitar chords or doing spread-eagle leaps off of fire hydrants or throwing Budweiser tallboys into a crowd at lunchtime, it’s because the “classic” mid-’90s line-up of Guided by Voices has released the first song from its reunion album, Let’s Go Eat the Factory, which is due in January 2012, and while at first these gentleman might have thought it a little tossed-off and incomplete sounding, as they have been listening to it repeatedly for the past few hours, they’re remembering that that’s how many of their favorite old Guided by Voices songs sounded at first or maybe even forever, and that the melody is indeed pretty unsinkable and the guitars fuzz and ring in a way that warms their large hearts, and let’s them stop thinking, if only for a moment, about how much closer these swollen, inflamed, nicotine-strafed and cholesteral-clogged organs are to outright stoppage than they were back in 1996, when Under the Bushes Under the Stars came out, an album on which this song would not seem so out of place. So forgive them. I’ll try not to spill any beer on you.