Guided By Voices - 'Half Smiles Of The Decomposed' (Matador Recordings)
4/5
By: Matt Tomiak
'Half Smiles of The Decomposed' is the kind of album that will delight your average GBV neophyte (i.e. the majority of the record-buying public.)
Jam-packed with melody-drenched AM rock with a twist, it's a career swansong
for Ohio native Robert Pollard, who under various guises and with ever-changing accomplices has been releasing records for the best part of 20 years.
And he doesn't ignore the frustration at GBV's perennial status as merely cult favourites. There seems to be a two-fingered salute aimed at the unappreciative mainstream on opener 'Everybody Thinks I'm A Raincloud (When I'm Not Looking)' - maybe two decades worth of song-titles like that went some way in ensuring commercial success eluded the band - by declaring 'This is not my day/And nobody really cares, any more, anyhow...'
Oh well - regardless of how the past has treated them, 'HSOFTD' has tunes, and lots of 'em. It's hard not to warm to an album such as this that declares itself to be 'another idiosyncratic rock masterpiece' on its cover, especially as in this case it's actually true. The Buffalo Springfield-ish 'Girls Of Wild Strawberries' is as wistful and luscious as a song bearing that name ought to be, 'The Closets of Henry' is textbook hook-laden alt-pop and 'Sons of Apollo' almost out-weirds Michael Stipe with a bizarre street-corner
preacher stream-of-consciousness rant.
Their own story may be drawing to a close, but with a legacy being continued by the likes of Ben Kweller and The Shins, it's unlikely that Guided by Voices will be forgotten.
Artists in this article: Guided By Voices
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