It’s time to welcome back Guided by Voices, even if you didn’t have the chance to miss them.
I was too young to catch this version of the band the first time around. With considerable time having passed between their latest release and 1996’s Under the Bushes Under the Stars, the “classic” Guided by Voices’ January return challenges listeners to forget the records and lineups that carried the GBV stamp for the better part of a decade. Although the GBV banner was retired in 2004, many fans felt the truest dynamic died when main man Robert Pollard dismissed Tobin Sprout, Kevin Fennell and Greg Demos after Under the Bushes….
In the intervening years, essential sidekick Sprout kept busy with a number of highly enjoyable solo releases. To call Pollard “active” would be nearly insulting his prodigious output, myriad monikers and achievements like last year’s monolithic Let It Beard, the final album from his Boston Spaceships. Both men contributed songs on the records regarded as Guided by Voices’ best, with Pollard’s stadium-sized croon dominating and Sprout providing a chiming lead guitar along with sweet, tuneful, no less rocking counterpoint.
Let’s Go Eat the Factory is a strong GBV outing, especially after a generation without. However, it cannot be easily placed or ranked among the band’s previous works. Pollard’s sweet stuff, “Doughnut for a Snowman” and “Chocolate Boy,” recalls his more recent solo output rather than anything from the 1990s. Though the material is quite strong, there are less hooks than anticipated. More polished than anything prior to Under the Bushes…, yet fragmented along the lines of Alien Lanes, Let’s Go Eat the Factory does not discard the great things the two songwriters have achieved in this lineup’s downtime. Fennell and Demos pick up where they left off, the former’s sparse style steadying mid-tempo numbers and stompers like opener “Laundry and Lasers,” “Imperial Racehorsing” and “Cyclone Utilities.” Breezier Pollard tunes like “How I Met My Mother” and lead single “The Unsinkable Fats Domino” pass by somewhat quickly, though not without pleasure.
Instead, with an element of surprise that elevates the whole, the highlights and anchor on this turn come from Sprout. The secondary songman sounds the most refreshed and invigorated on the collection’s two catchiest installments, “Waves” and “God Loves Us.” The trick is when he also provides the most beautiful and fragile moments, in the outro to “Spiderfighter,” “Who Invented the Sun” and “Old Bones,” the latter of which recalls The Beach Boys’ “A Day in the Life of a Tree.” When taken at once (along with his “One, Two, Three, Four” from the Doughnut for a Snowman 7-inch) there is a feeling that this is almost another songwriter, channeling the unwritten pop songs of Revolutionary War heroes. An antiquarian vibe is noticeable, if not intentional.
With reports of another record due as soon as next month, it’s a treat to be able to look forward to new material from this group, especially for someone who was too young to enjoy it the first time around.
