★★★★★
What remains admirable about Guided By Voices is their ongoing ability to raise the veil. By issuing six albums in less than four years, alongside innumerable EPs and singles, theirs is an artisan-like approach to the craft, not the tortured constipation that might see nine or ten songs drop into the bowl twice a decade...
- music.thedigitalfix.com
2014-05-27
★★★★★
Having used more mid-fi tailoring for the well-measured Motivational Jumpsuit, released only a matter of months ago, Guided By Voices return rapidly with a second LP for 2014, which keeps the now solidly established reunion rolling on, albeit via more lateral routes. With 'classic-era' line-up drummer Kevin Fennell having left somewhat acrimoniously to be replaced by 'late-Matador-era' GBV sticksman Kevin March and having largely been recorded in a proper studio, Cool Planet is a more complex...
- www.adequacy.net
2014-05-19
★★★★★
Though Guided by Voices' sixth album since 2012, Cool Planet, doesn't reach the heights of February's Motivational Jumpsuit, it's easily the most consistent of the band's post-reunion albums. The production is pitched right between the endearing amateurism of 1993's Vampire on Titus and the clean, professional faux-amateurism of 1996's Under the Bushes, Under the Stars...
- www.slantmagazine.com
2014-05-17
★★★★★
Guided By Voices' career has started to resemble seasons of the decades-long UK soap opera, . New albums are as frequent as afternoon reruns and the suspense of the saga stems from guessing what line-up of members make the best combination. In the case of , Tobin Sprout continues to be the necessary calming element to Pollard's boisterous songwriting, and ex-late version GBV drummer Kevin March is back on drums (replacing Kevin Fennell)...
- exclaim.ca
2014-05-16
★★★★★
So there have been a few changes recently in the Guided By Voices world. Kevin Fennell left the band and has been replaced on drums by Kevin March, who played with the band before their 2004 break. There's another change on the new album, Cool Planet. For the first time since reforming in 2010, the band went into one proper studio and cut a whole record. This does change the fidelity here, but it doesn't exactly change our expectations...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-05-14
★★★★★
The first and most important question with any new Guided by Voices record is how many of these songs deserve to wind up on GBV playlists or mixtapes. (Because hardcore GBV fans are the type to hang on to cassette players long enough for them to be cool again.) By my count, there are four such songs on Cool Planet. That might not sound like much, considering there are 18 songs on here, but we're talking about a band that releases a new album every three months...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2014-05-14
★★★★★
On Cool Planet (album number 22, the band's sixth since their reunion in 2010, and their second so far in 2014), Guided By Voices make yet another bid for the title of greatest rock and roll band of the late 20th Century. The late 20th Century. Because although these veterans of alt-rock have more than proven that they still have the gusto to muster up album after album in the 21st century, their sound today is one that still grasps and clambers at the halcyon days of their mid-90s output...
- www.thelineofbestfit.com
2014-05-14
★★★★★
When Guided by Voices played the Colorado stop of Riot Fest last summer, it might as well have been a time warp. The set was eerily similar to the group's performances in their mid-1990s prime, all wobbles and grumbles with an occasional flash of off-kilter transcendence. But there were elements of the performance that were jarringly different as well, namely an exhibition of cold, canned efficiency that almost utterly undermined the air of confusion and chaos that Robert Pollard and company...
- pitchfork.com
2014-05-13
★★★★★
"Writer's Block" isn't the strongest song on the fifth album by the so-called "new era GBV," but its title is the most sardonic. It encapsulates what some music reviewers (cough, cough) suffer from when reviewing GBV albums--because, really, what hasn't been said about this band by now?--and also references a condition from which Mr. Robert Pollard has apparently never suffered...
- filtermagazine.com
2014-03-21
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