Guided by Voices

With their first new material in nearly eight years, Guided By Voices milks nostalgia for all its worth. Let’s Go Eat the Factory is the first album after the reunion of lead singer and songwriter Robert Pollard—the band’s one constant throughout thirty plus years of membership changes— with the original band-members from the early nineties. With Factory, Pollard and co. try their darndest to recapture the atmosphere of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, the quirky lo-fi albums that put these Dayton, Ohio beer buddies on the indie map. Every so often, they succeed. The catchy single “The Unsinkable Fats Domino” could have been pulled straight from the garage rock of Alien Lanes. “How I Met My Mother” summons the tongue-in-cheek wordplay of Pollard’s best songwriting. The thirty five-second non sequitur, “Go Rolling Home,” harks back to the self-assured collage-pieces of their first productions.

Equally often, however, there’s a middle-agedness about Factory that reminds listeners that these guys are playing in 2012. Whereas Bee Thousand was created by a band of hobbyist musicians experimenting with guitars in a laundry room, Factory sounds like the work of musicians with expectations to meet and David Letterman concerts to perform. The songs are composed and played with better chops, but they’re also less catchy and less peculiar. Most of the second half of the album passes nicely enough, but there are more clunkers than standouts. “Spiderfighter” is one of only a handful of Guided by Voices songs to overextend its welcome, and it feels like self-conscious chaos. “The Big Hat and Toy Show” is slow enough to sound lackadaisical; it’s the kind of mostly-empty canvas that nineties-era GBV would have filled with eccentricities. And I’m still trying to understand the appeal of “Waves,” which sounds like a Tom Petty tune with the vocals run through a washing machine.

Skip the miscues and there is enough interesting material to redeem the album. “Laundry and Lasers” has the best hook of any song on Factory, and it most successfully renovates their lo-fi aesthetic with more modern-sounding reverberation. “Cyclone Utilities” transforms a routine drum bassline into something jazz-like by gradually dropping out beats. The band sounds most inspired when newly experimenting, rather than merely mimicking old experiments.

Factory doesn’t compare with the old canon, but it’s good enough to remind you of the glory days.