Goodbye Voices

It's true: Guided By Voices, the best rock band since the Replacements, is calling it quits. Their final album, "Half Smiles of the Decomposed," will be out next week. Their final tour will end in Chicago on New Year's Eve--it was supposed to end in New York City on that date, but they probably had trouble booking a venue. And then, after roughly twenty years of rocking the house, GBV will be no more.

Okay, so there's a bit of hyperbole involved. Guided By Voices was rarely more than Robert Pollard, the vocalist, songwriter, and mad musical genius with an abbreviated attention span that rarely took a song past the three-minute-mark, if not the two-minute-mark. And Bob will continue doing his thing, as he's done over umpteen solo and side projects over umpteen years. So really, what's the big deal?

The big deal is, Guided by Voices wasn't Bob Pollard and Friends--it was Guided By Voices. It was the best band you never listened to. It was the pure, unadulterated sound of raw, untempered guitar pop driven by a brilliance that produced over nine hundred songs in two decades. Through Guided By Voices, Bob put out gems that, had they been done by anyone other than Guided By Voices, could have been playing on your radio every five minutes. And he put them out roughly once a year.

Go. Listen to "Liquid Indian." Listen to "As We Go Up, We Go Down." "Back to the Lake." "How's My Drinking?" Listen to the best damn pop song you'll hear this year, "The Best of Jill Hives."

Okay, I'm a little biased. My wife and I started our romance at a GbV concert at Bowery Ballroom in New York City, on Valentine's Day. And they were the first, and really only, band that I felt personally involved with, because I picked one of their CDs up on a whim after hearing the singer was a schoolteacher from Dayton, Ohio, rather than waiting to hear about them from a friend or the radio. Guided by Voices is mine, the way a band can be yours when you're a sophomore in college and you grab some record out of a discount bin and discover something that makes your world a different place. And when you find something like that, you tend to be a bit possessive.

Anyway. Tickets for the Los Angeles stop of their final tour go on sale tomorrow morning. The final album goes on sale next week. Which means that you can expect, by the end of next week, a record review to end all record reviews. Be prepared.