What's that?  You say you like mid-period Guided By Voices in 
theory -- buncha guys from Ohio with faux British accents and 
fuzzboxes distilling the Who and the Kinks into under-two-minute 
chunks -- but you found the records themselves too sloppy, too noisy 
and too unedited?  What you need are the Capstan Shafts.

Seriously, the Capstan Shafts' second album FIXATION PROTOCOLS (out 
now on Rainbow Quartz) is basically the album Robert Pollard and crew 
could have made in between ALIEN LANES and UNDER THE BUSHES, UNDER THE 
STARS but didn't: practically every one of these 22 songs is under two 
minutes long (the whole album is over in less than 30 minutes) and 
consists of loose, scrappy little guitar pop tunes under punny, non 
sequitur lyrics delivered in a midwestern approximation of a British 
accent.  It's quite homemade-sounding (the Capstan Shafts are one guy, 
Dean Wells), but home recording equipment has improved considerably 
since the days when Guided By Voices were working with a cassette 
four-track with one broken track, so the hiss and tape glitches are 
largely eliminated, and Wells seems to have a better internal editor 
than Pollard did, so even the songs that are 48 seconds long sound 
fully constructed.  If this sounds at all appealing, do check it out. 
I really liked it even despite the general lack of novelty.

S