Bears for Lunch

The Bears for Lunch rounds out a ridiculously busy year in the history of Ohio lo-fi pioneers Guided by Voices as their third full-length album released in 2012. Back with a vengeance from an eight-year hiatus, the GbV brand is recalibrated for this trio of new albums with the classic 1993-1996 lineup of the band that produced its most adored records like Alien Lanes and Bee Thousand. The drive to create is audible, with all three of these collections (as well as two solo albums released in 2012 by GbV frontman Robert Pollard) stuffed with frantic amounts of song ideas, from off-the-cuff free-associative ranting to fully formed jangling power pop. Almost 20 years since those early albums of hissy four-track recordings, a couple of things have changed. In the 2010s the band has taken to mixing its infectious pop with slight hints of prog rock, as on the relatively epic album opener "King Arthur the Red" and the spacy paranoia of "Amorphous Surprise." While there are still some nods to h