GBV fans are fickle tripe sometimes. During the real "Classic" era, fans wanted a cleaner, bigger, more professional production to compliment the pop rock genius bowel movements. When GBV decided to polish their turds with big-time studio theatrics fans got pissed and stopped caring. And since Do The Collapse, fans wanted a quick return to the lo-fi, shit-sounds of the "classic" era. If you want classic GBV, THIS is for you. If you want the next B1000, then go spin your scratched up copy of Universal Truths on a Fisher-Price record player and STFU.

Uncle_Bob

What if I don't want either of the options provided?

I know exactly what you mean, Lemmy! You can only change the lyrics to Ace of Spades so many times and call it a 'new song' before it starts to get old.

Uncle_Bob

AWFUL

there ya go, a "review" that makes sense
people who think this "classic" lineup garbage sounds like "classic" gbv have no ears on

(and even if you listen without prejudice®™ it's simply terrible stuff)

addressing what you said, i don't believe anyone's ever wanted gbv to do anything but be gbv. normal-ass musick fans like th bits they like & take or leave th shit (and boy is there a lotta shit!), but i'm fairly positive they still respect bob no matter what he's doing as long as it's evident that he's following whatever muse he needs to at any given time; those postal blowfish jerkoffs (th people yr probably referring to when you refer to "GBV fans") don't even care what it sounds like cuz they couldn't tell good musick from a frog in a blender - they just need someone to revere and some giant collection of songs/stories/snippets/shitbricks to collect, log, and argue about on th internet when they aren't playing WoW or working in a cubicle. i don't remember ANYONE saying to me "i wish bee thousand was recorded in a big studio" and i don't remember anyone wishing for another alien lanes when gbv was making isolation drills. it's fruitless to do these things.

unless yr a critic. then you (might just) get paid to be an idiot. but i hope you aren't talking about critics.

th last two records don't suffer musicianship-wise; th songs are terrible and th recording (esp on factory, but certainly still on ufo) is just unforgivably bad (and why? they were great with a four track all th way thru 'tonics & twisted chasers' - so one would be led to believe that they could just jump right back in with that old style/skill, which hasn't proven to be the case.)

guided by voices has never been a band that needed a certain level of musicianship to achieve most of its ends; only when bob decided to take his songwriting in a certain direction did he feel he needed, say, th cobra verde dudes to help him prog-out some of those arrangements. BUT, two things: 1) anyone can give his great songs of any era a good go no matter how limited their musicianship (and who cares how his shit songs are played??), and 2) kevin, mitch, toby, demos - these ARE exceptional musicians. it might be argued (by those who want to think of them as hometown simpletons or at best idiots savant) that they are in some generic way th (charmingly) crummiest players, relatively speaking, of all gbv members, but even if you feel like accepting this "what if…" hypothesis they are most certainly not foremost in what's bringing these last two records down.

given, much of th playing on '…ufo' is crummy, but it seems set up to be that way - guitars that could've been tuned but weren't, etc - and th much-more-odd thing is that some of th better songs (like th title track) suffer from ridiculously embarrassing arrangements and - get this! - go on too long! i never thought bob would commit that crime - he always seemed to know right when to let a (great, alarmingly brief) song go so you were always left wanting more.

bob simply has no songs left (or no sense of how to get at them if they're still in him somewhere - it's ultra-sad, but with sycophants like th luna/fading captain assholes around for so long now, it makes all th sense in th world that his sense of what makes a good song is long-gone…but then this has been true for like a decade now).

I love Let's Go Eat The Factory but it took more than a few repeated listens until it blossomed. It sounds like a completely different record now than the first couple of times that I listened to it and I don't think I would have ever vibed with it if I didn't keep going back.

Thankfully, repeating the experience is a lot easier to do with rock and roll than with literature due to its sheer brevity. I think that's also why it's more forgivable to be uneven as a result of taking chances with music. Listeners aren't reading Moby Dick for the 4th time. It's 35-40 minutes. Melville better have gotten this right because I just read this book for the past few days. Two minutes of rock and roll that doesn't take you to nirvana? Go listen to your own awesome shitty band. Go to the next track. Throw it out the window and move on. HAHA. It's all pretty innocent-like Vonnegut comparing being pissed about art to being mad at an ice cream cone. You don't like it? Don't eat it. Go make your own and give us all a break and stop taking any credit or blame for it.

I agree with Ian Thomas about why GBV is likable:

"GBV’s charm has always been their ability to follow their muses, however strange, with a breezy casualness. Though GBV speak in puzzles both musically and lyrically, they remain inviting because they approach it with a lack of seriousness, a throwaway attitude."

I also like Brent Able's review of Class Clown. This is part of it:

"Guided by Voices are victims of their own greatness. Hiatus notwithstanding, they’ve been so good for so long that we’ve come to take them for granted, greeting each new release with some lazy variation of the same lazy response. Critics will mention Pollard’s prolificacy first and foremost, and the general unevenness and all-over-the-placeness of his band’s albums is inevitably deduced as a consequence; clearly the guy just shits out thirty songs a day, and decides their placement on albums through some aleatory ritual involving Budweiser and a dart board. Which: maybe.

But why not give Pollard more credit than that? It would be one thing if his prolificacy was marked by monotony, and every new Guided by Voices album and song sounded like the last. Any discerning listener can see that’s not the case: Pollard and co. are endlessly experimenting, and the wonderful inconsistency of their enormous corpus can be seen less as a case of poor self-editing and more as the byproduct of an endless attempt to exploit the unending possibilities of rock music. So what if they miss the target almost as much as they hit it? The song will be over in two minutes anyway. Is your time really so fucking important?...

Overall, his contributions might not be as impressive here as on Factory, but Pollard is really no better or worse than he’s ever been.

Which, really, is an accurate way to describe the second coming of Guided by Voices. They’re like your friendly neighborhood drunk: you always know they’ll be sloshed, but you can never quite be sure what they’re going to say or do the next time you see them. Class Clown gives us what is most best and most constant about the band—their sonic restlessness, shambolic hooks, broken glory—and nothing less. The next sixteen albums, we can only assume, will do the same."