#734 Guided by Voices - Let's Eat the Factory

I don't think Robert Pollard likes the idea of an album. I don't even know if he likes the idea of a song. I think he just wants to dump hooks and notes and melodies and noise into the world forever and resents being forced to put any kind of boxes around them.

How else do you explain the relentlessly short, endlessly numerous songs packed onto an album? Pollard seemingly poured notes into the CD until it was full, and then stopped, and called it done. How else do you explain the terrible, aggressively careless sequencing, with no regard for transitions, that the band has always displayed?

And now an album that blows the two most important slots on an album, first and last, on two songs that have nothing to do with the album as a whole and that have no business being in either of those two slots. Laundry and Lasers is a blunt, sludgy droner that sounds like it should be buried somewhere on the last third of an album (so, in this case, roughly track 18), not leading it. And Won't Apologize for the Human Race sends the album out on a drunken, Built to Spill throb that crushes any of the sunniness the album had mustered. And then the album, head-scratchingly, is just over. It could have stopped anywhere along the way and been just as reasonable. I swear he's either not trying or actively fucking it up. Both seem in line with his personality.

There's something hypnotic about the approach, I'll confess. When you abandon any sense of flow, the listener stops even expecting any. He drops any hope for a smooth ride, surrenders to song after song after song, and the whole motley menagerie collectively drives him mad. It's a fun kind of madness, especially when a particularly great little melody or texture jumps at you out of the darkness. Unfortunately those thrills are rarer than usual here, and the overall sound is kind of sedated and indistinct. You need your Echoes Myrons, your Valuable Hunting Knives, your Buzzards and Dreadful Crows to spike the muck laid out by your Hot Freaks, otherwise it's just disc full of notes, sloshing around indistinctly 3/5