The phase Guided by Voices entered around the time their classic ’90s lineup reunited for the 2012 album Let’s Go Eat the Factory was one marked by ferocious new levels of output. Even for a band known for churning out unrivaled, high-quality material, GBV’s release schedule accelerated, with new full-lengths coming out multiple times a year. Mirrored Aztec comes at the crest of one such wave, following three very different albums that were all released in a 16-month period leading up to this new 18-song collection. 2019’s Warp & Woof was a return to minute-long, muse-chasing fragments, while Sweating the Plague (which came out a few months later) was a guitar-heavy blast of proggy rock and Surrender Your Poppy Field (again, released within months of…
…its predecessor) leaned into trippy melodies and lo-fi presentation. Right out of the gate, Mirrored Aztec takes a different path completely, embracing songwriter Bob Pollard’s power pop side along with the hard rock sauntering that’s made up the entirety of some of their recent output. Album opener “I Think I Had It. I Think I Have It” flies by in under two minutes of righteous riffing and Pollard’s best Roger Daltrey-esque shouts. “To Keep an Area” is bounding jangle pop heavy on the kind of catchy melodies that made some of Pollard’s best songs. Even when Mirrored Aztec gets into weirder moods (the Devo-meets-baroque pop detour rocker “Please Don’t Be Honest,” the ham-fisted light metal of “Biker’s Nest,” the toy instruments and demented children’s choir on “Math Rock”), the album’s driving force is one of giddy excitement. The production is decidedly higher quality than some of the band’s recent returns to home recording, with tunes like “The Best Foot Forward” and sweetly melodic “Thank You Jane” exploding out of the speakers rather than offering the group’s familiar shambling lo-fi sound.
High-energy and high-strung, Mirrored Aztec is a cut above the usual set of fresh Pollard tunes. The memorable, high-octane, and outright strange moments all sit nicely together in a way that GBV’s best albums perfected, but the band don’t always achieve.