Guided by Voices

And so we come to last call at the House of GBV, and it's hard not to get a bit misty. For whatever indifference or disappointment greeted anything he'd made since Under the Bushes, over the years, Bob Pollard had become a bit like The Dude -- we took comfort in knowing that he was out there, the Drunk, doing a high-kick for all us sinners. As such, it's tempting to let GBV's final record take a back seat to The Concept of "GBV's Final Record" -- which, in some ways, is okay. There's nothing that separates Decomposed too drastically from the last few GBV outings. Pollard dutifully sprinkles a few mind-blowing pop songs ("The Closets of Henry") amidst a bunch of barely adequate ones. While this album is unlikely to gain the group any 11th-hour fans, it provides just enough to remind the rest of us what we'll be missing three years from now. -- J. Edward Keyes