Send "Guided By Voices " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Over the years, there were many Guided by Voices: the R.E.M.-obsessed, fidelity-be-damned early GBV; the high-kicking, hard-drinking, marathon-showing GBV; the Ric Ocasek-produced GBV with those misguided commercial ambitions. But, seven years after the band's 2004 bow-out and a decade and a half on from the peak of their powers, it's the Guided by Voices of the mid-1990s from which their legend truly springs-- all those long, beery Dayton nights with little more than a four-track, a couple 30-racks, and an endless supply of inebriant inspiration. Those few years saw those five knockaround guys wrenching every good idea they'd ever had into some of indie rock's most enduring music: Propeller, Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, Under the Bushes Under the Stars, and countless singles, EPs and one-offs. That Guided by Voices? They're back.When frontman Bob Pollard retired the Guided by Voices name in 2004, any and all cries of "why?" were cut with a strong undercurrent of "what's it matter?" At that point, roughly a dozen dudes had passed through the band's ranks, with the Fading Captain himself serving as its only constant. Pollard, in a rare display of predictability, went on to make a mess of solo records with a gang of late-era GBVers; the rock-solid Boston Spaceships, with whom he produced his best hiatus music, found pre-breakup bassist Chris Slusarenko in the passenger seat. But when this so-called classic era band of Pollard, Tobin Sprout, Greg Demos, Mitch Mitchell, and Kevin Fennell splintered sometime around 1996, Guided by Voices changed irrevocably: Pollard's songs grew knottier, flashier, and more professional, with would-be rock star Pollard making what sometimes felt like a last-ditch effort to make music that would place him in the arenas and over the airwaves that his old band had been too rough around the edges to attract. A reunion of that late-era Guided by Voices would've been nice, but it wouldn't have meant much. And, while watching the classic band run through "14 Cheerleader Coldfront" to a sea of upraised fists was a thrill, it's that GBV-- with their scrappy, song-a-minute, attention deficient charm intact-- you'd hoped for another album from....full text |
| Pastemagazine |
| In 2010, Robert Pollard reunited the much-beloved Guided by Voices for a tour with what was arguably the band’s best lineup. But, as proven by their latest release, it seems the feeling was too good to resist recording the super anticipated follow-up to the band’s last album before they originally disbanded, 2004’s Half Smiles of the Decomposed. The reunited band — which includes Pollard, Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Greg Demos, Kevin Fennell and Jimmy Pollard, some of the same guys behind Bee Thousand and Alien Lane — set out to record a collection of new material in their garages and living rooms. The result is Let’s Go Eat the Factory, a 21-track burst of classic Guided by Voices lo-fi production, trashy garage-soaked guitars and songs that could only come from Pollard’s near-obsessive approach to songwriting....full text |
| Avclub |
| There are dozens of guys out there who can claim to have spent time, however brief, in Guided By Voices. But it takes only a few seconds of hearing Let’s Go Eat The Factory to recognize the exact right combination of guys who recorded the band’s most beloved records. Saying Factory deserves to be placed in the vaunted company of 1994’s Bee Thousand and 1995’s Alien Lanes would be overselling it a bit. But Robert Pollard’s first album with the so-called “classic” line-up of GBV—Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Greg Demos, and Kevin Fennell—in 16 years captures a similar mix of in-the-moment inspiration, boozy camaraderie, and unhinged loopiness. As always, not everything works, and at first the unwieldy 21-song Factory seems to hang together as well as beer-soaked cigarettes. But then, like those mid-’90s classics, it starts to make sense as a stunningly scattershot compendium of everything Pollard has ever done well, or at the very least fearlessly attempted. Pollard remains a songwriting machine, tirelessly turning out tracks for solo album after solo album. For Factory, he wrote with this specific band in mind, and it shows: “The Unsinkable Fats Domino” is the sort of punchy, to-the-point pop song Pollard rarely bothers with anymore, and can still write very well when he’s motivated. “The Head” and “God Loves Us” are rapid-fire toss-offs that boast multiple hooks that come and go in seconds. And the wise-ass witticisms of “How I Met My Mother” and atonal weirdness of “The Big Hat And Toy Show” give Factory that feel of risky spontaneity so vital to the GBV formula. (That also goes for the album’s strangest, prettiest track, “Old Bones,” which sounds like “Auld Lang Syne” sung by a dying android.)...full text |
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