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."
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