Guided By Voices - Chocolate Boy

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Customer reviews
Press release

4...according to our Mike on Wed 11 Jan, 2012.

The first 7” from the new GBV album, Doughnut For A Snowman, served only to dampen my enthusiasm for the new LP, with its annoying whistling line and four B-sides, every one of them bad. Then I heard the album and actually the single didn't sound so bad in context, but there were certainly better songs they could've chosen. One of those is Chocolate Boy, out now on a chocolate-brown 7”, it's a mid-paced plodder with vocal harmonies and jangly guitars that sounds like vintage GBV. Like many songs on their new 21-song album, it's over almost as soon as it begins. On the flip there's a track called 'As The Girls Sing Downing' which is penned by guitarist Tobin Sprout. It's a really nice song too, actually, with a subtle high-gain guitar lead in the chorus that makes everything sound quite uplifting in a nostalgic early '90s way. This is much more like it.

"Chocolate Boy" is a bittersweet pop nugget off Guided By Voices' new album Let's Go Eat the Factory, the first release in fifteen years from the band's "classic lineup" of Robert Pollard, Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Greg Demos and Kevin Fennell. The B-side features the non-LP Sprout tune "As the Girls Sing Downing." "... it's downright bizarre how effortless and welcome [Let's Go Eat the Factory] feels. All of Pollard's Roger Daltrey- meets-Norm Peterson charisma is no match for a little chemistry. 'How I Met My Mother' and 'The Unsinkable Fats Domino' are 'Glad Girls'-caliber classics, full stop, with the kinds of immediate choruses too frequently elusive in Pollard's extracurricular catalog. But it's the shock of six (!) Sprout songs, including the elegiac 'Old Bones' and the better-than-it-sounds 'God Loves Us,' that shoot the record, against all odds, toward the top of one of rockdom's most swollen and enviable discographies." -SPIN

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