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Here’s a reunion project that succeeds in all the ways that matter, said Tyler Kane in PasteMagazine.com. Before Guided by Voices’ official 2004 breakup, leader Robert Pollard played with many musicians under the GBV name. But until now, nothing on record has been heard since 1996 from “arguably the band’s best lineup.” Together again, this ramshackle quintet of Dayton, Ohio, indie rockers has produced “a 21-track burst of lo-fi production, trashy garage-soaked guitars, and songs that could only come from Pollard’s near-obsessive approach” to churning out melodic ideas. The tracks aren’t polished in the least, said Jon Pareles in The New York Times. As with the band’s old material, “the point is to sketch and move on,” with tracks that are alternately “sparse and deliberately cluttered” with “guitar distortion or echo effects” burying the vocals. The results, predictably, are pretty “hit-or-miss.” Still, this is a band with “a reputation to uphold,” and “much of the time, it does.”
