Propeller

Propeller is the fifth Guided by Voices album. Pollard conceived it as a farewell in the face of years of obscurity and mounting debt, and it was the first of their albums to make extensive use of four-track cassette and lo-fi recording as an aesthetic. Significant portions were recorded in a professional studio, with Mike "Rep" Hummel engineering. Songs are punctuated by blasts of noise, awkward tape edits and sped-up or slowed-down parts.

The opening track, Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox, runs 5:41 and begins with a crowd chanting G-B-V that the band made in the studio, since they had not played live in years. The chant became a fixture of their concerts, and the opening sequence was recreated at their last show before the 2004 break. Track eleven, Back to Saturn X Radio Report, is a collage of songs, most of them originally meant for an album called Back to Saturn X, including a snippet of Tractor Rape Chain (Clean It Up).

Only 500 copies of the vinyl came out at first, each with a unique handmade cover decorated by band members, friends and family: screen-printing, hand-painting and found objects such as an empty Natural Light six-pack carton. Scat Records gave it a wide release by appending it to the CD of Vampire on Titus. A non-limited vinyl edition and a CD with reproductions of some of the original covers followed in 2005. Sprout recalled in the Guardian that Pollard said, after a night spent recording, "This is it, I'm done."