Many of our near-pristine digital libraries are plagued with little imperfections. We’ve seen them all: songs inexplicably without artists, bizarre misspellings, albums labeled ‘Track 1,’ ‘Track 2,’ etc. My personal favorite: the hugely popular Various Artists. It’s a nice symbol of the angry confusion our computers must feel when we upload some trashy compilation album, complete with the humorous, inconsistent mess of styles they carry with them. My strongest impression from Let’s Go Eat the Factory was simple: this “Guided By Voices” thing is a great big hoax. Just a crafty pseudonym for Various Artists to release even more albums. The record makes a lot more sense if you subscribe to this conspiracy.

To elaborate: just over a minute after the lo-fi post-punk opening ‘Laundry with Lasers,’ the nonsensical happy-go-lucky acoustic pop of ‘Doughnut for a Snowman’ comes as quite the shock. These surprises don’t stop. The string-adorned drama of ‘Hang Mr. Kite’: some bizarre Peter Gabriel tribute. ‘The Big Hat and Toy Show’: a strange blues mockery, complete with a maddening wah pedal guitar solo in the background. ‘Waves’: essentially a Pixies song. This chronic attention deficit for genre, combined with their long-standing love of very short tracks, leaves a final product that sounds more like a collection of interludes then a fully realized album. It’s also very annoying.

This effect is by no means an accident. The band helped spearhead the lo-fi indie rock movement of the early/mid nineties, with an impressively dense output of records similarly fragmented in influences and style. You could argue this album is a strong return to form for a group that spent much of the past decade in limbo; I’m not convinced. It comes across as a wasted opportunity.

The band’s “broken aesthetic” approach to music strikes me as lazy but, ironically, paves the way for the few successful tracks. Of note in particular are the dense, synthesizer-driven ‘Old Bones’ and the sparse, surreal ‘My Europa.’ They serve as frustrating evidence that the band is capable of manoeuvring several unique styles; they just don’t commit to anything. Hell, they actively don’t want to. Instead, we get a hodgepodge and are tasked with finding the good bits ourselves. I’m way too bloody lazy for that.

Ultimately, it’s an uphill battle to engage with this glorified playlist, even with its occasional hints of brilliance. Recommending this album feels a lot like buying someone a mass-produced compilation. It’s easy and essentially vapid. Plus, I’m really not sure I want to keep funding those Various Artists. They must have enough money as it is.