Half Smiles of the Decomposed is reportedly the final Guided by Voices studio album, and like many of the band's best, it's packed to bursting with sometimes inscrutable pleasures: melodies with the whiff of half-remembered classics, misbegotten home-taping experiments, arrangements that appear to collapse before resolving in brave choruses and, in "Window of My World," the baroque folkie musings of a psychedelic jester. With lyrics that sometimes veer into gibberish ("Fit me into your thimble/I'll be your comeback trail") delivered in a fake English accent, GBV guiding light Robert Pollard sometimes sounds like a prog-rock throwback. But he's less of a word splicer than he is a general mischief-maker, a fabulist who sees songs as brightly painted reality-distortion knobs. So long, for now.

“Time to Pretend”

Listening to MGMT’s breakthrough song, one might interpret it as being about the excesses of rock stardom, but it’s actually about the duo’s pet praying mantis. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden told Rolling Stone they got the idea from the insect's jerky movements. The mantis died, but the two bandmates kept the egg sack and allowed the hundreds of eggs to hatch. “We tried to name them all, but they died after a day,” said Goldwasser, with VanWyngarden chiming in, “But the praying mantis dance inspired us.”