Let’s Go Eat the Factory is the first release from Guided By Voices “classic line-up” in more than 15 years. I’m sure that for a lot of GBV fans, this is a momentous occasion, but as someone who’s only other experience with GBV was reviewing 2002’s Universal Truths and Cycles for his college radio station, the importance of this event is somewhat lost on me. And taken on its own, Let’s Go Eat the Factory doesn’t really sound like much to celebrate either.

This isn’t to say that it’s a bad album. “Laundry and Lasers,” with its lo-fi production, and simple riff gets the album off to a promising start, and the album is full of similarly strong pop rock songs like “God Loves Us” and “Waves” that sound as if they would fit right in on GBV’s earlier albums (according to a friend of mine who’s a big GBV fan, this does in fact sound a lot like their earlier albums). “Spiderfighter” shifts abruptly from a pretty standard rock song to a piano ballad shows that GBV are still capable of a few surprises, but by the end of the album, it all starts to sound a bit lazy to me, especially the last few tracks. “Go Rolling Home” and “The Room Taking Shape” both sound like they were written as they were recorded; "We Won't Apologize for the Human Race," the track that follows and closes out the album spends 4 minutes going nowhere.

So with nothing to compare this to besides 2002’s Universal Truths and Cycles, I’m left wondering what was so great about this classic line-up. Universal Truths and Cycles wasn’t a perfect album, but at least the band that put that album out seemed to be trying. I know that GBV have never exactly been the most polished group around, but it really sounds like Pollard and company knew they didn’t have to work very hard to make an album people would buy. I’m no recording purist – my music hard drive has probably something over 100 gigs of poorly recorded bootleg recordings - but something about a band that has the means to make a well-produced studio album, but instead deliberately makes half of it sound like shit out of nostalgia for their '90s glory days kind of irritates me. And ultimately, it sounds like GBV’s attempts to reclaim whatever magic their classic lineup had fall flat to my ears. Half the songs here are pretty good, but the other half are also pretty forgettable. This album just proves that it isn’t always so easy to recapture the glory of bygone days.

Track List:

1. Laundry and Lasers
2. The Head
3. Doughnut for a Snowman
4. Spiderfighter
5. Hang Mr. Kite
6. God Loves Us
7. The Unsinkable Fats Domino
8. Who Invented the Sun
9. The Big Hat and Toy Show
10. Imperial Racehorsing
11. How I Met My Mother
12. Waves
13. My Europa
14. Chocolate Boy
15. The Things That Never Need
16. Either Nelson
17. Cyclone Utilities (Remember Your Birthday)
18. Old Bones
19. Go Rolling Home
20. The Room Taking Shape
21. We Won't Apologize for the Human Race