I laughed heartily when I noticed that the music app in my iPhone listed the length for the entirety of 2011’s Guided By Voices reunion EP Doughnut for a Snowman as “7 minutes.” Just to re-emphasize, that’s five songs in seven minutes.
I laughed at the absurdity of it: The longest track clocked in at 1:43, the shortest a mere 43 seconds. I laughed because I’d coughed up $5 to iTunes for seven minutes of music. Still, the absurdity of it was kind of worth it. If Guided By Voices were known for one thing, it was brevity. Get in, get out, leave ’em wanting more. And sometimes leave a bit of a mess – but that’s part of the fun.
This tiny release represented the first real new music from the reunited lineup of Guided By Voices – reunited in two senses, since they broke up officially in 2004, but also because this is the first time this particular line up has worked together since 1996. Big things, however, sometimes come in small packages.
These seven minutes ended up functioning as a teaser for a period of astonishing productivity: Robert Pollard and company returned a few months later with the digital release of their 17th album on Dec. 20, 2011. Let’s Go Eat the Factory was followed in quick succession with two more full-length 2012 studio projects, Class Clown Spots a UFO and The Bears for Lunch.
Guided by Voices has issued at least one album in every year that followed, save for 2015. They released two LPs in 2014, 2017 and 2021, and three albums in both 2019 and 2020. That incredible run started with Doughnut for a Snowman, an almost-classic Guided By Voices EP tempered some by a sensibility the band didn’t have 15 years before.
Back then, they worked in a basement with boomboxes and cassettes, cobbling together bits and pieces of melodies into songs with a disarmingly charming, naive quality. That ramshackle nature isn’t something easily learned, but it’s something easily unlearned and lost: Pollard awkwardly shoehorned a reference to Krispy Kreme donuts into “Doughnut for a Snowman,” and stumbled through it. Something like this wouldn’t have made the cut back then, when he was sharper at being more off the cuff.
Musically, however, they retained much of that rough-and-tumble nature, so the title tune’s odd, slightly jarring rhythm seemed perfectly natural. Recycling the song’s chintzy recorder for the following “So High” didn’t seem like a cop out so much as a fitting coda. The two songs flowed neatly into one another, even though they didn’t make any lyrical sense together.
“Without Necks” was one of those “idea for a song” concepts that Guided By Voices often somehow find a way pull off. It constituted a mere jingle, but not particularly memorable one. As kind of a goof, it proved what Robert Pollard said long ago about every release having to have a throwaway. Yet it wasn’t really bad enough to consider a throwaway: “Without Necks” is just a weird other side of the band.
You get used to these things when you hear enough of their music and come to appreciate their place in releases as musical breathers. On their own, they’re flops. In the flow, with the rest of the music, it’s a nice little rest stop on the way to something more rewarding.
That arrived on Doughnut for a Snowman in the form of Tobin Sprout’s little gem “One, Two, Three, Four,” a sweet, simple ditty that reminded listeners what was lost when this lineup broke up and Pollard reformulated the band into a more cohesive studio-rock ensemble.
Sprout’s contributions have always been overlooked, but they often come to mind as the George Harrison to Pollard’s John Lennon. (There’s really no Paul McCartney in Guided by Voices.) Like Harrison, most of Tobin Sprout’s tunes didn’t immediately stand out, but looking back, you realize how integral his songs were to the albums as a whole and how tuneful and nice they were. Sometimes nice is just, well, nice.
Doughnut for a Snowman was, in the end, short and sweet and left us wanting more – and luckily there was more (plenty more!) to come.
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