At various moments during their sold-out performance over the weekend at Metro, Guided By Voices conjured up a dozen or so apparitions of rock "n" roll past: They were the band of weekend warriors at the high school sock hop, the graying punk band on a reunion tour, The Who before succumbing to rock operas, Cheap Trick rocking Budokan, and Syd Barret just before the crackup. The Dayton quintet brought them all back in two-minute doses so compact that there wasn't even room for a guitar solo, much less any special effects-unless on considers the vast clouds of cigarette smoke and spilled beer that hovered over an on the stage, courtesy of the five rather charmingly disheveled, upper-thirtyish band members. The showmanship was fit for a garage rather than a concert hall. There were the striped flares and flailing feet of Greg Demos, who wielded his bass like a poleax; the contrast between the windmill chops of guitarist Mitch Mitchell and the precision strikes of alter ego Tobin Sprout; and the full-bore attack of drummer Kevin Fennell. This compensated for the relative restraint of singer Robert Pollard, whose usually manic routine of karate kicks and leaps took a back seat on this night to his fine voice, a full-throated bray spiced with a British accent, depending on which rock star he was imitating at the moment. The songs came in a torrent of guitar riffs so instantly familiar that they could have been lifted from some forgotten K-Tel compilation of one-hit wonders. Except these were all original songs - about 40 were performed in 90 minutes - and their breadth was nearly as remarkable as their brevity; pop melodies immersed in fuzzed-up guitars that bridge psychedelia and punk, dour ballads that blend fairy-tale images with dreams of flight, tiny anthems about the search identity called "Motor Away", "I Am A Scientist" and "The Weed King". Pollard doesn't write songs so much as rock haiku, often cutting off tunes just as they're getting started, as he aspires to make art rock that hits faster and with less frills than some of his heroes. Most of the Metro show consisted of more recent material, including a number of songs from the forthcoming album, _Under_The_Bushes,_Under_The_Stars_. Even these unreleased songs sounded like instant anthems, if not a new way of hearing the past: Classic rock dressed down and speeded up for the '90s.