Best of Guided by Voices presents mixed blessing

At heart, fans of Guided by Voices are masochists. As any of these people will tell you, their favorite band -- a band that emerged with the Pixies, Sonic Youth, and Pavement, the best and most beloved in indie rock -- is at its finest when putting them through a veritable musical hell.

For GbV's lead singer/songwriter Rob Pollard and his ever-changing cast of back-up musicians, this means releasing literally hundreds of songs a year, the majority of which are half-finished cast-offs that most bands would hesitate to call demos. Yet, wading through the four-track tape hiss of the early recordings and the sheer immensity of Pollard's later-era side-projects to ferret out the fleeting moments of pop-genius that is GbV's daunting catalogue is half the fun of being a fan.

With this in mind, Matador Record's newly released Best of Guided by Voices: Human Amusement at Hourly Rates is a mixed blessing. On one hand, the compilation, which distills thirty-two of GbV's best songs into an hour-long disc, will certainly garner the band a slew of new fans. After all, this is a band that, if nothing else, has the ability to write a catchy, hook-laden pop song. Classic tracks like "My Valuable Hunting Knife" and "Game of Pricks" are guaranteed to win over anyone who has ever hummed a Beatles song hours after hearing it, bobbed their head to the Who, or sang along with the Cars.

Yet, it doesn't seem particularly fair for these new fans to be introduced to Guided by Voices by a best of; a format that, by its very nature, eliminates whatever filler or mediocrity might have marred the original albums. The filler -- the strange, formless song fragments that float throughout GbV's records like flotsam in a polluted river -- are just as essential to the overall listening experience as the more fully formed and accessible songs.

Fortunately, Pollard, who chose the songs and sequenced the compilation himself, at least attempts to make his band's best-of feel more like a cohesive record than a haphazard collection of singles. On Human Amusement, all twenty-three half-baked, surreal seconds of "Hit" sit proudly next to "Glad Girls," one of the band's most sweeping and dynamic songs. Likewise, concise but undeveloped tracks like "Non Absorbing" and "Drinker's Peace" rub shoulders with more fully formed and ambitious songs.

Pollard's stab at cohesion creates some problems though. Because the tracks are sequenced for effect and not by chronology, new fans will probably feel disoriented bouncing between the band's early and late material.

For although Pollard's songwriting has remained essentially the same throughout his nearly twenty year long career, the sound quality of his recordings have varied wildly. Guided by Voices's first albums, released in the late 80s before the band even had a record label, are so poorly recorded and lo-fi that they border on being impossible to listen to. The sound quality improved as the band's popularity grew, but until 1997's Mag Earwhig!, the Dayton-natives were firmly entrenched in the lo-fi indie rock scene.

But unlike fellow scene-members Unrest and Sebadoh, the shoestring production of GbV's early recordings weren't a willful defiance of mainstream music's over-produced glossiness, but rather the product of financial constraints. Always a band that wanted to be bigger than they actually were, to sound like the Who when in actuality they sounded more like a long-forgotten psychedelic garage-band, Guided by Voices began releasing better produced records as soon as record labels gave them the money to do so.

Both periods of the band's history get equal time on Human Amusement. However, because of its lesser production values, the early material ends up sounding inferior next to the later tracks, since their sheer loudness will likely capture more listeners' attention. More than anything else, this is the compilation's biggest injustice, since the band's best songs really are the earlier ones.

In the end though, Human Amusement is a success. Not only will the album earn the band a flood of much-deserved new fans but it will remind old fans why they started buying GbV records in the first place. The ultimate appeal of Guided by Voices might be experience of slogging through their quantity to get at some quality, but it's nice to be reminded that there's plenty of quality to find.