GbV's practically perfect pop just shy of bull's eye

GUIDED BY VOICES

Sunfish Holy Breakfast (Matador)

One property of perfect pop songs is that you always wish they lasted just a little bit longer. Guided By Voices is on some level conscious of this fact, and, over the years, the Dayton band has poured forth countless two-to-three-minute gems that leave the listener craving more. Now, with Tobin Sprout packing up for a solo career, this abbreviated pop-song format seems to stand like an appropriate synecdoche for the band's existence: We know that GbV--to continue under frontman Bob Pollard--may be ready to embark in a new direction, but we can't help wishing the same song would go on for just a little bit longer.

Appropriately, then, the band stages this final EP of Sprout-inclusive GbV as a sort of encore. Sunfish Holy Breakfast kicks off with a rock cliché hilariously turned upside down: before the first track, fans clap furiously and cheer for "One more, man!" Typical of GbV's blasé and self-defeating manner, however, the demand for an encore sounds like it takes place in a thin-walled basement in Dayton with only about six or seven fans in attendance.

And perhaps even more typically, the band doesn't treat this EP as a particularly crucial farewell to an era in GbV history. Without much fanfare, the band offers a total of 10 songs that collectively last just over 20 minutes. Most of the contributions are Pollard's, and they mine the same musical and lyrical territory that Under the Bushes Under the Stars, the band's most recent full-length, did. The EP's reversion into the shamelessly lo-fi production values that GbV helped popularize on their earlier albums does take some getting used to; many of the songs feature muffled or over-trebly voices encased in wow and flutter, distant-sounding guitars, and little percussion.

There is only one really great song on Sunfish Holy Breakfast. "A Contest Featuring Human Beings" bounces along with a chiming rhythm guitar and a wonderfully erratic vocal melody courtesy of Pollard. It's the only track on the EP that fully captures the insistent playfulness and catchiness of which the band is capable. Unfortunately, it only lasts about a minute.

The remaining minutes are filled with a handful of above-average tunes, a few mediocre ones, and a fairly uninteresting song by bassist Jim Greer (Damnit Jim, you're a critic, not a songwriter!). "Jabberstroker," the only song penned exclusively by Sprout, lumbers complacently along with a droning guitar line and is held together by its simple, repetitive chorus and Sprout's endearing nasal whine. "Canteen Plums" and "Beekeeper Seeks Ruth" also exploit fuzzy washes of melodic guitar played at andante tempos, sans drums.

Altogether, Sunfish Holy Breakfast comes across as a somewhat unfocused and less than vital effort, but GbV's haphazard methods and successes don't seem to result from concerted effort as much as from pure musical accident. Even the band's most stellar moments play almost like they were chance occurrences, as if a blind-folded man were winning a contest in darts. Count this EP just a little shy of the bull's-eye, and pray that Pollard can keep the band's future on target.

--I-Huei Go

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