Robert Pollard has declared that Half Smiles Of The Decomposed will be the final Guided By Voices album, but what does that really mean? Pollard writes and records songs constantly. Sometimes he releases them under his own name, sometimes under some project name, and sometimes under the name Guided By Voices, a band whose lineup has the same turnover rate as the average Arby's. For a while, Pollard reserved the GBV name for his slickest work, but since returning to Matador after a two-album stint at TVT, he's returned to the old GBV formula of mixing fully formed songs with false starts, fragments, and ideas struggling to take shape. Few would call the results wholly satisfying, but even the weaker records have had their charms, and there seemed to be no reason why Pollard and GBV shouldn't keep playing to the faithful for years to come.
