When You Take Me To School: A Brief Review Of The New EP From Cub Scout Bowling Pins (Guided By Voices)

It's been literally only weeks since Guided By Voices dropped their third album of 2020. And if Styles We Paid For revealed a band adept at recording during a lockdown and still retaining a facility for navigating the power pop form, the group's newest release is even better. Even if it's not a Guided By Voices record.

Calling themselves Cub Scout Bowling Pins, the fellows in Guided By Voices have assembled here to offer up a debut EP called Heaven Beats Iowa. And while the title cut swirls around an organ hook that's pure 1910 Fruitgum Company, the wildly catchy melody is only one of six fun gems here. Given over wholeheartedly to punchy and playful numbers, Heaven Beats Iowa is one of the better Guided By Voices releases in the last few years, even if it's coming out under a psuedonym. "Hobson's Beef" sounds like the current GBV line-up rewriting an ancient GBV number, while "Gear Balloon Mousetrap" is even better. This one, a stomper with a touch of The Move about it, is skewed and warped, acid rock from another plane, even as "Moon Camera" banks Pollard's massed vocals against what sounds like a xylophone. Those numbers, along with the trippy "Funnel Cake Museum", all charm but it's "School School" that positively sends this whole experiment into the stratosphere.

That all-too-brief number rocks with deligthful energy, conveying more in less than a minute-and-a-half than other bands have spent careers trying to get across, and it's for me the clear highlight here. Still, all of this debut from Cub Scout Bowling Pins is worth cranking up loud. Heaven Beats Iowa is, like the recent Styles We Paid For, a signal that GBV have more tricks up their sleeves, more energy even on lockdown than others on the road, and plenty of ideas left to fling forward to please listeners.

Heaven Beats Iowa is out on Friday via Rockathon Records.

More details on Cub Scout Bowling Pins, and their daytime alter-egos Guided By Voices, via GuidedByVoices.com

[Photo: Guided By Voices]