Concert Review: Guided by Voices Tightens Up for Another Epic Cleveland Show at Grog Shop

Another year, another great Guided by Voices show.

It can be easy to take the quintet for granted. After all, the Dayton-based band, known for its prolific output and lengthy beer-fueled concerts, has deep roots in Cleveland and has played the area seven times since frontman Robert Pollard reformed it in 2016.

But Saturday night’s sold-out show at the Grog Shop showed why doing so would be a big mistake.

The Dayton-based indie rock band, who last played here in 2022 outside the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in a show that spanned nearly three hours and 50-plus songs, tightened up this time around. This show only lasted two hours, 10 minutes, and the song count was somewhere in the 40s. Perhaps the 66-year-old Pollard is feeling the effects of aging, or maybe the band just decided to do it a little differently this time around.

Whatever the reason, the result was a more focused yet still sprawling concert, with a mix of tunes from recent albums and ones that stretched back to the early 1990s.

The show was in support of new album “Strut of Kings,” a slightly uneven affair that sees the band indulging in progressive rock. Thankfully, Pollard and the crew mostly chose the strongest songs from the album to play on Saturday, with “Fictional Environment Dream” and “Serene King” standing out. With a catalog of thousands of songs to choose from, it’ll be interesting to see if any cuts from the album make it into future sets, something of which Pollard himself even seemed unsure.

“When you have 127 albums you have to cut shit,” he said. He also said a new album, “Universe Room” would be out in February.

It was clear what would never be cut, though. Classics like “Game of Pricks,” “Teenage FBI,” “Glad Girls,” “I Am a Scientist” and many others were trotted out for the umpteenth time yet still sounded fresh.

And while Pollard was ever the engaging frontman—occasionally kicking the air, twirling his microphone like Roger Daltrey of The Who and explaining his love of Miller Lite (“I like beer that basically tastes like water. You’ve got to drink 40 of them to get fucked up”)—a lot of the credit for that goes to the group of musicians he’s maintained for eight years. It’s simply one of the best lineups in Guided by Voices’ four-decade history.

That includes lead guitarist Doug Gillard, a Cleveland native who conjures sounds from his axe that straddle the lines between noise, noodling and riffing. His work, especially on his own song “I Am a Tree,” propelled an already potent lineup to new heights.

The band, following a brief break after playing for nearly two hours, emerged to play an encore of mostly classic songs, including “Jane of the Waking Universe” and “Your Name Is Wild.” They remained in fine form to the end, capping off another epic performance.

Openers The Sueves ably warmed up the crowd with a 35-minute set of its brand of taut garage punk. The Chicago-based trio, fronted by guitarist/singer/Clevelander Joe Schorgl, showed its range of influences and a bit of swagger as they thrashed away at their instruments. They even managed to shape singer/songwriter Roger Miller’s “Reincarnation” into something all their own.

Eric Heisig is a freelance writer in Cleveland. He can be reached at eheisig@gmail.com .

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