The most talented player in his league labors in Midwestern obscurity for years. Then, without warning, he hits upon just the right supporting cast, and strings together an impressive streak of victories. After a historic three-peat, he briefly walks away from the spotlight and his team, only to return amid new surroundings, having discarded his classic squad in favor of new, younger collaborators. With this new lineup, the player profits off his star power for another long stretch, occasionally offering up fleeting glimpses of his prior greatness, but mostly overstaying his welcome, whittling his adoring public down to a small core of blindly loyal fans.
To call Robert Pollard the Michael Jordan of indie rock is a wince-inducing comparison if ever there was one, but it's hard to ignore the parallel lines on a slow decline. Correspondingly, it makes sense to treat the release of what has been declared the final Guided by Voices album like an athlete's number-retiring ceremony, with Pollard's Daltrey-fringe jacket being lifted to the rafters and a bronze statue of the singer in mid-kick unveiled outside Pitchfork HQ while we all sing "Game of Pricks". Despite the piñata status of the Pollardverse over the last decade, where every rookie staffer was given a practice thwack at the latest tossed-off GBV side project, the majority of us can't help but feel a little sad to see the group's credits roll.
It must be noted, however, that the band's death was not a sudden one. The romanticized mythology of Guided by Voices in the mid-90s may have been one of the greatest tales of indie lore: A gang of bored Midwestern middle-agers, fueled by ethanol, gather nightly for basement recording sessions, and in doing so happen to lay down some of the greatest pop anthems ever poorly recorded. No author could've dreamt up a more ridiculous cast, with a mic-swinging frontman sweating five songs a day and leading an amateur band full of impossibly wonderful names like Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, and Greg Demos.
But with Under the Bushes Under the Stars closing out that incarnation's three-album summit, Pollard chose to molt and start anew, dismissing the "Dayton lineup" and replacing them with the snakeskin-boot professionalism of Cobra Verde. From that point on, GBV was all but synonymous with The Robert Pollard Experience, a vehicle for Bob to choose whatever personnel he calculated most likely to achieve his new dreams of crossover radio success. In the inane court of sellout justice, one could probably throw the book at Uncle Bob, but far more distressing was that he seemed to misplace most of the group's strengths amidst an ever-growing pile of side project detritus.
Half Smiles of the Decomposed, like the preceding Earthquake Glue, finds Pollard aiming the bow of the GBV ship back towards some semblance of what made their fuzzy early days memorable. While the lo-fi sound Guided by Voices perfected has long since become a lazy fashion statement of slapdash indie bands, Pollard's anthems always sounded paradoxically hollow drenched in stadium production, and Half Smiles settles upon a more comfortable mid-fi compromise that reflects virtually none of ex-producer Ric Ocasek's syrupy brightness.
What continues to elude Pollard's memory, unfortunately, is the economy of arrangement that used to set his music apart, melodic viruses that promptly deposited their hook-filled DNA before immediately perishing. Even the shortest songs on Half Smiles ("Girls of Wild Strawberries", "Gonna Never Have to Die") would be the GBV equivalent of a side-long suite on older LPs, their 2-minute runtimes inflated by such routine features as second verses and chorus repetitions. Unsurprisingly, these shorter songs are also the best-- "Girls" a bright acoustic march, "Gonna Never" a tattling sing-along laced with startling synth. "Closets of Henry", meanwhile, proves that Pollard will never lose the ability to trigger the fist-pump reflex, contracting listeners' biceps with mere drum rolls and ohhhh's.
Yet lyrically, Pollard continues to move in a more literal and reflective direction, resuming recent albums' obsessions with deconstructing his much-beloved World's Rockingest Alcoholic persona. If opening his band's final statement with a song called "Everyone Thinks I'm a Raincloud" and chanting "for far too looooong" over the closing fadeout doesn't give you a snapshot of Bob's current attitude, look no further than the ominous crawl of "Sleepover Jack", as dark a song as can be found in the swollen GBV discog. Sounding every wrinkle of his nearly 50 years, Pollard sounds knocked around by the song's slapping, incessant guitar riffs, sighing, \x93I know/ You're gonna fuck up my makeup/ You're gonna make up my fuckup."
Every GBV release (yes, even Do the Collapse) since their heyday has had a pocketful of bright spots, though, and the mediocre filler that rounds out Half Smiles' lineup is, sadly, par for the band's late-era course. Slow, limp songs like "Window of My World" and "Tour Guide at the Winston Churchhill Memorial" can't come close to even the outtakes (Suitcase) of the outtakes (King Shit and the Golden Boys) from the band's classic lineup, and album-sequencing-freak Pollard continues to neglect the sort of 10-second fragment interludes that used to suture their ADD-stricken albums into cohesion.
And so the rock star dreams of Dayton's most prolific grade-school teacher reach their exhausted conclusion, the suitably bombastic career-ender "Huffman Prairie Flying Field" slyly announcing, "If that's what you want to hear/ Then that's what I will sell you." That may be exactly what we're about to get in the post-GBV era, as Pollard mentions in a recent interview that his next release will be a double-album (shock!) of forgotten tracks from his shoebox archives. While retiring the name of GBV may be no more than a symbolic move, it's possible that leaving behind the franchise, its expectations, and its faded momentum is just the thing to relight a flame in the man of 10,000 songs.
