Guided by Voices, The Electrifying Conclusion DVD

reviewed by dave heaton

I saw Guided by Voices play live around 20 times between 1995 and 2004, including once on their final, "Electrifying Conclusion" tour. On a handful of those 20 nights they seemed like easily one of the best, most explosive, most riveting rock n' roll bands ever. On many of those nights, they were dynamite in one moment and completely sloppy in the next, often depending on how much alcohol they'd drunk, but even when sloppy they still were fun to watch. On some of those nights, especially near the end, they wavered somewhere between decent and absolutely tedious, with band leader Bob Pollard rambling between songs and adlibbing unnecessarily during them, and guitarist Nate Farley often unable to play one good note after the first half of the set.

The Electrifying Conclusion DVD captures the final night of Guided by Voices' final tour, in Chicago on New Year's Eve. Certainly the band isn't always playing at its peak, and the 4-hour length of the show is awfully hard for even a major fan to watch straight through, but overall they play decently. Plus, criticizing the band's performance on this night misses the point. This isn't a performance, it's a party.

Take this DVD as a portrait of a band celebrating the last 10 years of touring, and the last 20 years of recording, with one final blow-out. There's energy in the air; it occasionally lifts the band to great heights performance-wise, and occasionally makes them not care if they hit a lot of bum notes or miss most of a verse's lyrics. Which was always the point of the GBV live show anyway: these unlikely rock stars, led by an ex-school teacher, rocking out like they were superstars.

During this performance DVD's four-hour time, you witness not just a thorough run-through of the extensive GBV/Pollard discography, with "hits" standing next to forgotten songs that they've hardly ever played live, but also a party where old members and friends come up to play and hang out. Most memorable are Pollard's suet with Tobin Sprout on "14 Cheerleader Coldfont", Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster and former GBV drummer Jim Macpherson each showing up GBV's drummer Kevin March with their playing (and then some – they live him in the dust), and former bassist/lawyer Greg Demos, whose on-fire performance style serves as a reminder of how truly un-inhibited and wild GBV seemed back when they first started playing live. "Shocker in Gloomtown" with Demos and Macpherson in the band sounds amazing, even with Pollard flubbing the lyrics because he's so in awe of Demos.

In this show GBV plays 47 songs in the main set, nine songs in the first encore (most from the Bee Thousand/Alien Lanes era), and seven songs in the second encore. "It's kick-ass time", Pollard declares during the first encore, and it's true that this section of the show ends up being most riveting, especially the second encore, its seven songs obviously selected in part with the lyrics in mind as appropriate goodbyes.

The show ends appropriately with the trio of "He's the Uncle" (one of their best songs, fittingly buried on an obscure release), "Exit Flagger" (an iconic, cult-favorite rocker with the chorus "promise to leave you"), and what Pollard calls "the ballad of GBV", "Don't Stop Now" (appropriate in so many ways). But my favorite moment from the whole show is the splendid version of the smooth power-pop song "Pendulum", a middle finger to societal conventions with the now sort-of-appropriate line "when the big door swings open and shut / we'll be middle-aged children / but so what".

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