With 28 tracks spanning the course of 41 minutes, the album would fundamentally alter the concept of what a rock and roll record could be. Originally released on April 4, 1995, Alien Lanes served as the first Guided by Voices album to be released on Matador Records. Limited to a one time press of 2,500 copies. Inspired by the multicoloured drumhead featured on the album’s artwork, this new edition is pressed on blue, green and red multicolored vinyl making it the first non-exclusive colour vinyl edition of this release. You could have given Little Whirl to Cheap Trick and it would have been a 1977 hit.Matador Records release a 25th Anniversary vinyl edition of Guided By Voices’ 1995 album Alien Lanes. How do they get away with this? Even the epic Striped White Jets is shorter than a typical Sixties pop song.ĭid anyone know Ex-Supermodel was even being recorded?Ĭhicken Blows? Pollard has the ability to turn a joke into a masterpiece. The King and Caroline… what’s with that vocal dropping out? “seeeeelllllllll….” Such an emotional track, somehow a minute and a half long. You are rewarded well for flipping the album, with one of the most in-your-face tracks on the album. The lyrics perfectly complement the sound. The attack of Motor Away seems to drive the recording down with the weight of a slightly below-key guitar attack. The combination of Auditorium and Motor Away are a three-minute concept album. The way the song transitions from one style to the next is very reminiscent of many mixes on The Beatles. The way that Pimple Zoo disappears into a wrong note, just at the very right instant, as it’s fading out but hasn’t actually finished. As with many aspects of this album, the essentials really stand out if only because that’s all that there is.Ī Good Flying Bird compresses the very essence of the Sixties into one frantic, single-guitar-driven minute-and-seven-seconds. Not until Game of Pricks does a track get a McCartney-esque treatment. It’s basically a double album, made by someone who only had enough tape for 40 minutes. Thing is, if you count the tracks, this album is only three shorter than The Beatles. I would love to hear McCartney lay a bassline to that. Watch Me Jumpstart should be the theme to a movie. The rhythm guitar seems as if it’s being struck by a drumstick held by a semi-rhythmic toddler. And this was a studio extravaganza, compared to their prior albums.Įvil Speakers is so downright bizarre and such a jump from the previous track’s feel that you right away think it might be an accident. The low quality of the audio is borderline comical. Pollard loved to hear his voice in that echo-y sound and he had a nickname for it. Then the faders go up, bringing all kinds of weird noise, and the vocals and guitar take it away. We’re hearing the worst of home recording. It’s a very hypnotic start for the album, balancing itself almost exclusively on a single chord.Īfter the first 15 seconds, you don’t really know what to expect. To me, this is the most penultimate GBV track, but then again that could be because it was the first one I heard. No other track by Guided By Voices arrests your attention and sticks in your head like A Salty Salute. It was presumably recorded on an audiocasette-based 4-track recorder, and its overbearing compression and lack of proper equipment grounding bring all sorts of bizarre noises to the foreground. Listening to the music through headphones can be a jarring experience. In a sense, it’s the album I imagine them making if they’d never actually made it into a studio. When I listen to Alien Lanes, my thought is that it does sound a lot like the Beatles. It’s certainly a period in which they were known to be on their worst behavior in the studio. Still, I find the album to be their most awkward, and perhaps their most lazy. Being their only double album, the math isn’t helping. In many ways, The Beatles (aka The White Album) was the most diverse, the most divisive, and the most enduring of the band’s albums.Ĭertainly there are more “weak songs” on The Beatles, if only because there are so many songs.
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