Guided by Voices
Half Smiles of the Decomposed
2004, Matador Records
And now an ending.
As you may know, this was the grand finale of Guided by Voices at the time. No more Guided by Voices after this. They were going out with an amicable break-up. Robert Pollard needed to move on. The news was everywhere. Maybe you read about it in Rolling Stone. Maybe you read it on some music news website or a message board. Maybe you went to a record store in the autumn of 2004 and saw Half Smiles of the Decomposed snuggled in the new release racks with a sticker on the shrinkwrap straight from Matador Records that touted it as The Final Album.
If you were a fan, you likely felt an urgency to not miss out on The Electrifying Conclusion tour, which was a shorter tour than usual. No Europe. No Canada even. It officially began in August, wound its way through about two dozen reliable stops in the US, and had a hard ending. New Year’s Eve in Chicago.
The band whose show was always a party would end on the biggest party night of the year.
And then lights out. That would be it. So long, Guided by Voices.
Or maybe not.
As I write this almost twenty years later, everyone and their ex-con uncle knows that Half Smiles of the Decomposed is NOT the final Guided by Voices album and that New Year’s Eve 2004 was NOT the final Guided by Voices live show.
I’ve never seen anyone have a problem with that, though.
After all, in the stacks of press that the band got in 2004, I don’t recall many articles that brought up what’s now an obvious question: “Guided by Voices are ending, but what even IS Guided by Voices?”.
Or how do you conclusively break up a band that’s already broken up and reformed itself with mostly different players twice in the last decade? We (and Pollard) would confront that later.
Back in 2004 though, we went with the moment.
Who knows what the future holds?
Guided by Voices are closing up shop and maybe this really is the end.
Robert Pollard turned 47 in the middle of this. He stopped coloring his hair. This tour was the first time we saw him with a head full of natural silver. Meanwhile, Guided by Voices live shows were longer than ever, pushing three hours while Pollard kept up his front man act. He doesn’t sit on a stool and play guitar. Never has. He throws his whole body into his performance. He moves around, swings the mic, launches into a high-kick here and there.
I don’t know if Pollard consciously thinks of it this way, but the Guided by Voices live act imposes a serious test on old bones and joints. It’s a challenge for an aging man and I think that’s the point. It’s Pollard’s dare to myself. He doesn’t seem interested in quiet acoustic shows. Guided by Voices have to bring you rock and Pollard needs to belt out 40-50 songs.
And when any of that is compromised, it’s all done.
That tension hangs over every tour up to today. Any one of them could be Pollard’s last.
That’s why many of us believed at the time that Half Smiles of the Decomposed and The Electrifying Conclusion was the end.
That’s also why it was so lovable about six years later when it turned out that it wasn’t.
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Half Smiles of the Decomposed IS still an ending, though.
It was the end of Robert Pollard playing along with the music industry game. Put out a record and then tour your brains out and do a thousand interviews. Produce, perform, sell yourself. Live in a van, airplanes, hotels. Explain “what inspired the new album” a hundred times by phone to writers from St. Louis, Toronto, and Brussels.
Fact: By the time the “final” tour started, Pollard’s next solo record, From a Compound Eye, was finished. It had even been intentionally leaked to a small group of fans in late 2004 who, from what I remember, were good about keeping it off of the file-sharing networks. Pollard didn’t know when it would come out (it would take about a year and a half, seeing release in early 2006), but he felt good about it as his next thing. He was already talking in 2004 about going solo and even continuing to perform, but on a lighter schedule than GBV.
He’d been thinking about this for a few years, he also said, but no Guided by Voices album had felt right yet as an ending until Half Smiles of the Decomposed.
Isolation Drills is an album about frustration and mistakes. Can’t end there.
Universal Truths and Cycles is a hyperactive statement of survival, not just moving past personal troubles, but also emerging from a major label experience with your soul intact. Can’t end there, either. Survivors keep going.
Earthquake Glue reflects feeling out of the step with the world and unsure if rock music matters anymore. It finds beauty in the situation, but that’s not how Guided by Voices should close up shop, either.
They need to go out with triumph. Anthems. Good vibes. Some melancholy is essential because you don’t earn the big mic-swinging moments without those. However many turns happen along the way though, the songs should leave us with a sunset to admire.
That’s Half Smiles of the Decomposed. It’s an album about winning and real winning is being scarred and wise and having nothing to prove.
This lineup of the band sound more at ease in their skin than ever, gliding from rockers to pop gems to rumbling tension-builders to Pollard’s compact prog workouts. They summon thunderbolts and light breezes and strange earth tremors with the same comfort.
You can hear their mileage together (well, okay, bassist Chris Slusarenko was new–and we’re going to hear a lot more from him later) and it’s a beautiful sound that carries you through all fourteen songs.
Opening track “Everyone Thinks I’m a Raincloud (When I’m Not Looking)” sounded in 2004 like the last great Guided by Voices song. It’s not just a glistening anthem. It’s not just a fascinating title. It’s also a statement of purpose. Pollard begins the song feeling useless and removed from everyone and then picks himself up in the chorus. “Everyday is another world”, he writes. Right there, all dark moods from the previous albums are thrown out and gone. We’re starting over. It’s a new day. Savor the light.
The tension between the first and second song on a record is important to Pollard. It’s normal for him to go for an immediate twist to let us know that anything can happen here and that’s where the alien rhythm of “Sleep Over Jack” comes in. Ask me every other Thursday and it’s my favorite track.
“Girls of Wild Strawberries” is nothing more or less than another expert piece of pop from Pollard, inspired by the women in Ingmar Bergman films, he says. It bumps nicely against the pounding “Gonna Never Have to Die” and its killer acoustic guitar solo.
“Window of My World” is pure 1969 sugary pop-psych. I get Moody Blues vibes from it. Whether that’s praise or criticism is up to you, but, me, I’m way into it.
“Closets of Henry” is power pop poised on the edge of heaven. It’s in a rush, but never at the expense of its melody and sets the scene just right for “Tour Guide at the Winston Churchill Memorial”, one of Pollard’s most straightforward love songs ever. I love that he gave it a title that never comes up in the lyrics.
“Asia Minor” closes side 1 with mystery and melodic piano plinking.
Side 2 is a little heavier and in love with the midtempo. It’s strange and uncompromising. full of thick clouds and fierce wind.
“Sons of Apollo” sounds like part of a rock opera as it builds up and up only to climax with a murky lo-fi clip. It might sound weird if you’re new to all of this, but to the initiated, it’s another strange GBV jump-cut.
“Sing for Your Meat” is an old man’s message to the world’s young men. It trudges through mud to tell us to stay strong through life’s unfairness. Pollard has said that it was inspired by the band Kings of Leon and their issues with their record label.
“Asphyxiated Circle” is quietly the best song on the album. It’s one of those moments that make art-rock sound like pop to the point where you can hardly tell the difference between the two. It’s infectious as hell, but it’s hard to explain why. Its hooks mix together in weird ways.
The art-rock fog takes over with “A Second Spurt of Growth”. The lyrics aren’t too complex (it’s about rising to challenges and getting what you want), but the eerily gentle music of nothing more than an agile guitar, a keyboard, and Pollard’s voice sucks us into another world.
“(S)mothering and Coaching” keeps us in that place, but the whole band chime in this time, adding crunch and power to Pollard’s fatherly angst.
At the end, “Huffman Prairie Flying Field” walks us home with a pop melody, a delicious fadeout, and a poignant lyric about music and its effect. What it means to listen to it and think about it. The verse “And if that’s what you think you heard/ Then that’s what you heard/ And if you that’s want you to hear/ Then that’s what I will tell you” boils it down in plain language. A song means what you think it means. A band means whatever they mean to you. Do you remember them fondly when they’re gone? Do you forget about them? Do new generations get into them?
It’s out of the artist’s hands, but putting a period on the end of the sentence might help. Close the door, give it some years, and then go back later (when the work is now “translucent and peeled”) and see how it holds up.
That’s why I still respect Half Smiles of the Decomposed as an ending, as a place to reflect on what came before and to get ready for what happens next.
Put on your party clothes and toss a little confetti for it.