Guided By Voices

★★★★

Styles We Paid For GBV, INC. CD/DL/LP

Once-mercurial cult phenom maintain the focus of their late-period purple patch.

Consistency had never previously been their watchword, but the latest incarnation of Guided By Voices has seen former schoolteacher Robert Pollard set aside his more haywire compulsions in favour of focused tunefulness. The group’s sixth album in two years maintains their recent high standard, long-time foil Doug Gillard’s lucidly poetic guitar lines making delicious sense of Pollard’s fevered Wire-meets-Genesis-meetsThe-Who confections. The hits-from-another-dimension come thick and fast: Mr Child feeds Byrdsian psychedelia into the post-punk mangle, Crash At Lake Placebo evokes the sweet mystery of Murmurera R.E.M., and They Don’t Play The Drums Anymore’s winningly lopsided lurch harbours the unforgettable hook, “They sit beating their puds and staring at their screensavers.” The proggy meander of War Of The Devils and Slaughterhouse’s murky stomp, meanwhile, prove that Pollard’s late-era discipline has not come at the cost of his unique and unpredictable charm.