Even when Robert Pollard was exploring new extremes in amateur home-recording, hyper-prolific songwriting, and Budweiser consumption in the 1990s, he was always picky about which of the thousands of songs he wrote was officially issued under the Guided by Voices name. From their 1986 formation through to the b(r)and's dissolution in 2004, Guided by Voices proper released an average of one full-length album per year. That's a brisk clip for most acts, but a relative coffee drip when you consider the song overflow Pollard continues to divert to his exponentially increasing array of solo and side projects. So his decision last year to revive Guided by Voices with its "classic" 1992-96-era line-up suggested a return not just to the band's ramshackle roots, but their old quality-control standards as well.
The band's actual post-reunion strategy tells a different story. Pollard and co. were already well into their mid-30s when the band first emerged in the early 90s. Now, two decades on, they seem determined to make the most of this second wind and release as much music as possible while they can still physically withstand the scissor kicks and windmills. The Bears for Lunch is their third album of 2012, following January's comeback Let's Go Eat the Factory and June's Class Clown Spots a UFO. And like its immediate predecessors, The Bears effectively picks up where this line-up left off with 1996's Under the Bushes Under the Stars, mediating between the band's formative lo-fi lunacy and their desire for a more streamlined sound.
But if all this new GBV material faithfully approximates the form and fidelity of the band's signature works, its impact has been diminished by a lack of context or conceptual vision. Back in the mid-90s, each new GBV album played out like a game of "will they or won't they": would Pollard and his trusty foil Tobin Sprout limit their morsels of melody to 60-second spurts, or would they allow the songs to flourish into alternate-universe power-pop classics? And despite their randomized appearances, those album sequences were always carefully considered, where even the seemingly throwaway tracks were strategically stitched into the crazy-quilt patchwork. But by mostly settling into the Under the Bushes mid-fi comfort zone, the band's 2012 albums mostly just sound like one Guided by Voices song after another-- some exceptional, some forgettable. That's hardly a bum deal for long-time fans, but there's little sense of the organizing principles that made those early albums eminently replayable and rewarding.
The Bears for Lunch, however, is the most consistent of this year's trifecta. It may not boast an instant, indeliable earworm like Class Clown's "Keep It Motion" or Factory's "Doughnut for a Snowman", but there are no buzzkill duds like "The Big Hat and Toy Show" either. And, of the three, it's the album that most faithfully approximates the tumbling, track-to-track momentum of the band's mid-90s masterworks, with off-the-cuff oddities like the gruff busker ditty "Have a Jug" and the absurdist chant "Finger Gang" effectively setting up more dignified, resonant turns like "Hangover Child" and "The Challenge Is Much More".
As per GBV tradition, Pollard's lyrical concerns mostly orbit around aviation, medieval folklore, and boys of various preternatural abilities. So the greatest revelations here come when Pollard seemingly takes stock of his own mortality, as on the sleazily suggestive love song "She Lives in an Airport" ("she makes it quicker and competition thicker/ designed to spark up a real weak ticker") or on "The Military School Dance Dismissal", which sounds like Pollard crooning a Hunky Dory piano ballad in some Dayton dive at the age of 85. Sprout, for his part, responds to Pollard's ever-changing whims by keeping his feet firmly planted in Rubber Soul, contributing The Bears' most richly melodious songs in the folksy "Waking Up the Stars" and "Waving at Airplanes" (the latter of which is no less poignant for pinching its acoustic fanfare from Bad Company's "Feel Like Makin' Love").
Taken together, GBV's three releases this year plot an alternate late-90s course for the band, one which in Pollard stuck with his basement buds and never hooked up with Cobra Verde for 1997's muscular Mag Earwhig!, never signed to TVT, and never asked for Ric Ocasek's phone number. This GBV would've simply continued to crank out album after album of pleasingly wobbly indie rock, gradually refining their craft and reining in their eccentricities but stopping short of realizing their hi-fi arena rock potential.
Still, as The Bears' late-album progression gets tripped up by the one-note discord of "Tree Fly Jet" and "Amorphous Surprise", you can't help but think the band's re-emergence would be that much more dramatic if they had pared down their three 2012 releases into one record stacked with the best songs from each; surely, no O.G. GBV fan would've felt cheated by receiving "only" a single, no-filler album from a line-up they never thought they'd see in action again. After all, Guided by Voices' 1994 critical breakthrough Bee Thousand was as much a triumph of judicious pruning as quality songcraft; the most important takeaway from this year is that Guided by Voices can still produce enough of the latter to allow for the luxury of the former.
