And that, of course, is the tragic part. For these cloudy memoirs are all we have of Guided by Voices' music. Boom-box tapes, half-completed demos, muffled bootlegs from their few small concerts, attended mostly by friends, this is it. They never recorded in a proper studio, they never made an album, they hardly ever even seemed to finish songs. We can no more reconstruct the true greatness that should have been theirs from this shallow impression than we can solve the Kennedy assassination by watching the Zapruder film over and over again, as helplessly as we find ourselves doing just that in desperate attempts to assuage our fascinated frustration.

But, as inadequate as this record is, it is so much better than nothing that just the thought leaves me teetering unsteadily on the brink of tears.

And the irony, just as with Spinal Tap, and perhaps as with all truly accurate parody, is that this music ends up having quite a lot of the virtues of the material it is satirizing. Just as This is Spinal Tap made a not-entirely-implausible heavy metal album in its own right, even divorced from the film, Bee Thousand stands surprisingly well on its own. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the producers' efforts to do their subject justice is the fact that, listening to this album, I find myself wishing that some more of the fictional albums alluded to in the film had actually been made. Making people laugh is hard enough; making them keep smiling even after they've stopped laughing is something else again.

This is the pop song. Plenty of people, since its formulation, have chosen to do something else, but it's been relatively rare that anything not exhibiting these characteristics has been considered "pop". At the risk of sounding proclamatory, though, I'm forced to say that Guided by Voices appear to be challenging this calm confidence. For, on the one hand, it seems intolerant in the extreme to call this music anything other than 'pop', in the truest musical sense. Yet, on the other, it fails several of the usual tests. Most obviously, the arrangement of Bee Thousand, both in musical space and in time, breaks from convention in some important ways. The production strews instruments around the record with what at first seems like complete disregard for their interactions, but which, on further examination, seems to be ultra-careful intent. Audio fidelity of any given part frequently changes drastically from song to song, and sometimes even within a song. Parts come in and drop out. Odd quasi-incidental recording artifacts drift in in company with expected elements, so that a sparkling guitar melody will bring along an odd insectoid buzzing, and a rich harmony vocal seems to arrive over phone lines that are overdue for replacement. Drums turn up missing on more than one track where their presence seems anticipated. The piano and vocals of the concluding track sound as if they were recorded inside some sort of large, old-fashioned, iron house-heating apparatus. Most pop records work very hard to create the illusion that their production was seamless; Bee Thousand goes so far to the other extreme that it's as if as soon as any part was recorded, the entire studio was disassembled and sold, and a new one was purchased at garage sales and hastily assembled before recording the next part.

The flow of the record over time is nearly as strange as its arrangement across the musical spectrum. Songs start and stop with little warning, and with no evident concern for anything like completion. Several last long enough to stick in the mind as coherent pieces, but I'm not sure there's a single track here that wouldn't sound strange pulled out of the context of the album and played on its own. I'm sure this isn't why Guided by Voices hasn't gotten any airplay I'm aware of, but it can't help. The credits list twenty tracks in the album's not-epic 37 minutes, but the number of disconnected musical passages is rather higher even than that. The three-minute benchmark, you can deduce, is paid no heed. The lyrics are, like the rest of the album, sensible taken a phrase at a time, but hard to fathom in larger chunks.

But, to reiterate the important detail, this is definitely pop music, and superb pop at that. Production and sequencing aside, there's hardly a moment anywhere on Bee Thousand that doesn't sound like a moment of a soon-to-be-classic pop song. And while the fact that the album doesn't actually deliver any of those songs sounds lamentable, lamentation certainly isn't my reaction to it. I sit, rapt, as it plays. It finishes, and I start it over again. I can't stop listening to it. Bee Thousand is that impossible-sounding animal, a timeless pop album not actually built out of pop songs. Tomorrow I'm going to go to every record store I know and buy everything else by Guided by Voices that I can find.