Fact: When Guided By Voices, my favorite band of all-time, announced that the classic line-up was gonna release their first new album in 15 or so years, I wasn’t excited. I wasn’t surprised, either, but I also wasn’t jumping up and down. I told friends and such that I didn’t want this to happen, I wanted them to just keep playing all the classics. Bob had my permission to play as many shows with Toby, Mitch, Greg and Kevin as he wished, but the sometimes dreaded reunion album was the last thing I wanted.
They played their “final show” at Hopscotch in September, and I was there, forever grateful to maybe see them for the “last time ever in a live setting”. A few weeks later, the announcement came that not only was their a new album coming, but that it was already in the can. Recorded in secret to the public eye during 2011, the album was titled Let’s Go Eat The Factory, and would be released on New Year’s Day 2012. My initial reaction was sad; I didn’t want the men who wrote/recorded/got drunk to some of my favorite songs of all-time, the men who sat with 4-tracks in basements and garages playing the first things that came to them, to attempt it in 2012. I wanted it to stay in the 90s, those 90 second blasts of rock. In a present day where lo-fi is faked through recording techniques, I didn’t want them to have to do the same to get back the sound they would eventually make (dare I say) popular.
The first single came out: it was called “The Unsinkable Fats Domino”, and I was surprised. It was good, like really good. The crunchy guitars, Bob’s vocals, the melody, it was as if they picked up where they stopped with 1996’s Under The Bushes Under The Stars. And by the time they dropped second single, “Doughnut For A Snowman”, with it’s tip of the hat to the classic GBV move of tacking an unknown song at the beginning of another song, I was ready for this album. And it’s actually good, really good, dare I say great even? They touch on the albums the classic line-up made in the 90s (the lightning charge guitar of “Cyclone Utilities”), and even touch the early 2000s for a second (the barreling out the gate with “Laundry & Lasers”).
Of course, there are a few songs that just seem odd fitting, almost like a waste of space, including a string of bits near the end of side two. But near the end you also get the set’s highlight, if not the highlight of this entire reunion, in “Chocolate Boy”. It’s got everything GBV is known for and loved for, a catchy melody sharing space with Bob’s ever-so-strong vocals, and its succinct 90 seconds it lasts. These are the moments a fan like myself lives for, knowing that nearly 30 years after they were founded, and 16 years since they put out an album together, that they still have it. Now to wonder if the follow-up, Class Clown Spots A UFO, will be just as good when it drops in May.
Let’s Go Eat The Factory is out now digitally and is in stores January 17th.
Oh, and if you didn’t see the fall felt through Ed Sullivan Theater the other week…
