For the almost 20 years that they were a band, Guided by Voices created some of the catchiest, most hook-laden music that has ever been consigned to tape. Taking a decidedly low-fi approach to most of their recordings, GBV were prolific in creating one to three minuet bursts of guitar oriented pop and/or rock.

I think it was Pete Townshend that said something to the effect that the perfect pop song should be no more than two-and-a-half minuets long or thereabouts. Not only did GBV take that bit of advice to heart, they also took the entire sound that came out of England in the 60s – particularly that of bands such as The Who, The Kinks and Creation – and, well, ripped it off. But as they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery and GBVs homage to 60s Britpop is brilliantly realized in exquisitely crafted songs that happily acknowledge their influences.

Taken from their final album Earthquake Glue, “The Best of Jill Hives” is a good summation of what Guided by Voices was all about: two guitars, bass and drums and a singer who affects an English accent while singing.

Although comparitively slower than other GBV songs, “Jill Hives” immediately grabs the listener with a hook-driven rhythm section. Guitars join in and put down melodic layers over the easily danceable beat, but it is Robert Pollard’s affected voice that gives the song a certain compelling force. Reminiscent of The Who’s Roger Daltrey, Pollard’s vocal delivery tops off what is already a perfectly realized pop song.

Seemingly adding extra weight to his singing style, are Pollard’s characteristically eccentric and hermetic lyrics: “ Paid up weathered and type-o / Clad in gladstone watch him go / Swimming beneath the microscope /Hello lonely bless the nation.” Rather than be interested in providing word arrangements that make “sense,” Pollard seems to be more interested in strings of words that on the surface appear coherent and sound good together but are simultaneously completely and purposely obtuse. “I don’t know where you find your nerve / I don’t know how you choose your words / Speak the ones that suit you worse / Keep you grounded, sad and cursed / Circle the ones that come alive / Save them for the best of Jill Hives.”

Who is Jill Hives anyway and what’s this song about? Answering these questions is a waste of time. Like so many pop songs, what’s important isn’t meaning, but rather the combination of sounds and words.

Originally written by Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah” has been covered by a host of well-known performers including Bono, K.D. Lang and Bob Dylan. But perhaps the most compelling version of the Canadian icon’s song is the one performed by Jeff Buckley from the 1994 album Grace.

Barely into his 30s when he died, Jeff Buckley, like his father Tim before him, was a talented songwriter haunted by an addiction to heroin. And like his father, he died a young man. At the beginning of what should have been a brilliant career, in 1997 on a warm spring night in Memphis, Tennessee, fully clothed, Jeff Buckley swam out over the Wolf River and drowned.

Hauntingly, Grace sounds like it was recorded underwater. Shimmering guitars and Jeff Buckley’s sometimes high-pitched, operatic voice, create a disorienting drug and alcohol induced soundscape. With only an electric guitar for accompaniment, he sings Leonard Cohen’s words seemingly in total opposition to the established poet’s masculine gravitas.

Both lucid and bleary like a drunk on a long walk home, Buckley’s guitar playing is sharply defined and yet carries with it the quality of narcotic dreams. His guitar comes to us in mesmerizing swells then is punctuated by clear individual notes pulled by fingers sure of the mark.

In a way, his style of playing compliments Leonard Cohen’s words. “Hallelujah” is furnished with clearly defined imagery: “Your faith was strong but you needed proof/You saw her bathing on the roof/Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.” And yet its biblical references and romantic notion of the world are always out of reach – another dream, the memory of which makes the dreamer turn bitter after waking.

Even without Jeff Buckley’s haunting vocals and guitar, Mr. Cohen’s song is already a slow, harrowing examination of romantic love. With it’s real and simultaneously distant poetic imagery combined with Jeff Buckley’s ethereal musical style, this version of “Hallelujah” is both dream and nightmare.