Spatula Forum

Hurray for me! I have written about my deep and throbbing abiding passion for indie-rock stalwarts Guided By Voices before on this here blog, and tomorrow night I'm going to be up in Portland checking out one of the shows on their fabulous farewell tour. Have a few much-needed vacation days coming post-election and plan to hit Powell's Books and music stores and generally geek out in the big city.



Excited to catch GbV one last time before they call it quits; admittedly, their last few CDs haven't been their best, but the quirky, insanely prolific song stylings of Robert Pollard remain one of my favorite musical signposts of the mid-1990s. I was going through my far too large GbV CD collection today making a little mix CD to listen to on the drive up, realizing that I own probably close to 20 of their CDs from the last 20 years or so -- and I'm nowhere near having all of them. The band and its side projects are so incredibly immense that, to preserve fiscal sanity, you really have to just draw a line somewhere. (And admittedly, the quality control starts to slip after a while.) But 1994-1999 or so GbV highlights like "Alien Lanes," "Bee Thousand," "Under The Bushes Under The Stars" and the underrated "Mag Earwhig" and "Do The Collapse" still stand the test of time as unique, untoppable pop pleasure. I like that GbV is calling it quits now rather than dragging it out too much longer -- most bands probably do have a shelf life, although a lot of them don't realize it.