E-Mail This Article to a Friend Buried treasures Guided By Voices unearth more music BY FRANKLIN BRUNO

The most telling element of Hardcore UFOs (Matador), a new five-CD (plus one DVD) box set by Guided By Voices, may be Banks Tarver’s film short, "Beautiful Plastic." An apparent outtake from Watch Me Jumpstart, Tarver’s 1996 band documentary (also included here), the vignette opens with main-man Robert Pollard upstairs in his Dayton home, trading high-school basketball tales with old chums. Descending to his basement-cum-studio, he returns with a cardboard "box of shit" from the years when his musical activities were obscure unto invisibility. He finds old flyers, cover mock-ups (Naked Fat Baby), and a 1983 notebook full of neatly copied lyrics for never-recorded (and barely remembered) songs: "Murphy Had a Birthday," "Illogical Banker," and so forth.

To watch Pollard explain how each fragment fits into the band’s self-created myth is to be reminded why Guided By Voices were ever worth caring about. Though he now pursues something closer to a normal career in rock, Pollard still seems a closet visionary, a stand-in for the multitudes whose unglamorous addresses and straight professions — he taught fourth grade for 14 years — cloak rich and unsuspected creative lives. It’s a peculiarly American way of being an artist; in a way, he’s the rock-and-roll heir to Emily Dickinson, Joseph Cornell, and (less pleasantly) "outsider" artist Henry Darger. For years, GbV’s press hook has been that their music finally emerged from the basement; the real story is that it sustained itself there for so long.

Hardcore UFOs isn’t as monomaniacal an expression of Pollard’s pack-rat aesthetic as an earlier GbV box: Suitcase, which credited exactly 100 never-released recordings to as many tossed-off band names. Instead, the present package tries to satisfy all comers. For newbies, there’s Human Amusements at Hourly Rates, a 32-song best-of, also available separately. For the avowed but non-obsessive fan, there’s Demons & Painkillers, which collects B-sides from their two Matador stints. And advanced students of Pollardiana are rewarded with Delicious Pie & Thank You for Calling and Live at the Wheelchair Races, culled from his seemingly bottomless archives. (Among the four, you’re looking at 132 tracks.)

There’s little to say about the quasi-hits compiled on Disc One, though it’s good to see that standouts by auxiliary songwriters (ex-member Tobin Sprout’s "14 Cheerleader Coldfront," current guitarist Doug Gillard’s "I Am a Tree") make the cut — along with much of GbV’s first breakthrough album, Bee Thousand. The live material, co-compiled with online tape-traders, covers various post-1995 lineups and balances staples ("Motor Away") with scarcer choices ("Johnny Appleseed," last heard on a highly eBayable UK EP). GbV are a solid live band, but this is the set’s least compelling volume; their onstage mandate to booze up and rock out inevitably blunts their art-rock tendencies and narrows their stylistic range. The B-sides and (especially) the outtakes discs are more representative and more satisfying. The highlight of the latter is a mini-suite of lovely guitar-and-vocal-only songs ("Perhaps We Were Swinging," "Mother & Son") at the folky extreme of Pollard’s writing. Not everything reaches this standard; but how many actual songs could live up to titles like "The Who vs. Porky Pig" or "I Invented the Moonwalk (and the Pencil Sharpener)"?

The set’s final volume is another oddity: GbV’s debut release Forever Since Breakfast, seven songs recorded in 1983 with founding guitarist Mitch Mitchell and a long-vanished rhythm section. (There’s also a guest shot by one Mitch Swan, of profoundly obscure Dayton Smiths-clones the Pleasures Pale.) As late as 1996, it was still available from the band’s "Manager for Life" Pete Jameson as a mail-order item — in Watch Me Jumpstart, a stack of copies is visible in Jameson’s silk-screening workshop.

But even perpetual adolescents have juvenilia: this is the only pre-Matador release Pollard’s been reluctant to reissue, considering it an embarrassing symptom of his then-trendy early-R.E.M. worship. Forever Since Breakfast turns out to be stronger than its reputation. The prominent 12-string guitars and mildly droney arrangements do have a certain chronic murmur to them, and the clean but uninventive eight-track studio sound resembles any number of independent releases from the period. But "Fountain of Youth" hints at a harsher psychedelic edge, and the disc’s overall feel is closest to the Illinois-based jangle-pop associated with Ric Menck and the Bus Stop Records stable. The stately "Let’s Ride" and the chiming, charging "The Other Place" are top-flight in their own right; derivative or not, they’re more than mere signs of what’s to come. Notably, both are Pollard’s pleas for the kind of escape the band’s later, more visible career eventually supplied: "Let’s ride on airplanes and buses . . . Let’s leave the routines of living behind."