Alien Lanes

My impression of the GBV song writing process: “Hey, that’s a really good idea for a song! Let’s write a couple more verses and maybe a bridge or something” “Nope. Song’s done. We’re moving on.”

Well, that was unpleasant. My life is not better for having listened to 28 - yes, you heard me, 28 - Guided By Voices songs. I know some of them are only seconds long, but time is a finite resource and I'm a little upset that some of it has been stolen by these jokers. Full disclosure - I'm writing this while I'm listening, mostly because I can't wait for this to be over. It keeps getting worse. Was there just a song with someone snoring continuously in the background? Really? I'm going to need some serious ear cleanser when this is all over. Zero stars and never, ever again.

28 tracks in 41 minutes is wild. If they threw out the half that are complete crap and developed the rest into full songs, they may have something decent.

This is one of those albums where I consider not continuing with this journey. There is nothing new here, no one is breaking any ground. Its not like this is clearly a masterpiece within its genre, either. Heres the best part, this isnt the worst thing Ive heard on this list. Far fucking from it. 2 stars.

Sara - 2 Marko - 3.5

Another how the fuck did this album make it into this list

Und was bitte hat dieses Allerweltsprodukt in dieser Liste zu suchen?

Just a boring, inoffensive, nothing record.

Boring

Its absolutely wild that one album contains this many catchy ideas. Some of them are lightning in a bottle, some never got developed enough, and others are throwaway but it's still just wild the output of this band

Yeah, really liked this one. Cool sound, a bunch of shorter tracks, very all over the place

Good indie rock. Sounds underproduced and raw, which always does it for me.

The longer that the album went the harder it was to listen to. There doesn't feel like an overarching purpose for the album, other than to collect 28 disparate brain farts into one place. It was quirky, then it got old.

I know some people like raw, repetitive strumming of out of tune guitars. Not me. This album was pretty torturous. It might feature some artistry in the lyrics, but it was served on a platter of mustard ice cream. Hard pass.

That wasn’t bad, there was some really great electric guitar parts on there that I enjoyed. Other than that everything else was meh. there were some really weird songs in there to like one had someone snoring in it I think. So yeah I don’t think I would listen again. 2.137/5

great record but where's bee thousand?!

Listened to this with the washing machine going on in the background. Not sure if that was an improvement for some tracks. Would be interested to see how you play this album live. Can you even remember that many different song elements. It's hard to call a 30 second track a song, and that's only the third shortest track on the album.

Short songs damn Why’d it get weirder the further you get into the album

Robert Pollard’s song-lettes are charming enough but become less effective as the 28 song album moves along. Those 28 songs are completed in only 41 minutes so, while GBV is the perfect band for the A.D.D. crowd, the album sounds more like a collection of unfinished demos. That may the point but that doesn’t make it a particularly interesting album.

Interesting album full of tracks that sound like other bands or did other bands copy the sounds from this album

70

The songs are mercifully short

Really enjoyed hearing this but it's not the best. It's clearly influenced by the beatles and people who were influenced by the beatles like big star. There are some great songs in here but they're kind of hard to find among the crowd

solid, could be better, could be worse; kind of weird

#481 Quite liked the lo-fi sound to this and appreciated the songs being short and sweet but by the same token, it felt like they had a lot of good ideas that didn’t have as much time to breathe. Heard before? ❌ Would I revisit? ✅ Listen before you die?❓ Fave track(s): Blimps Go 90 Rating: 6/10 ⭐️⭐️⭐️

cool, but not really my type of music

This was very interesting! When I read the Wiki blurb and saw lo-fi I got nervous but I don’t really feel like that’s an accurate description? Playlist add: “Little Whirl”

A non offensive 90’s album

Dachte erst, dass ich das komplett kacke finde, weil mir Lo-Fi-Production häufig auf den Sack geht und ich dieses skizzenhafte Songkonzept ziemlich nervig finde. Wenn man aber akzeptiert, dass es nicht immer zwingend notwendig ist, Strophe und Refrain noch ein zweites Mal zu spielen, dann erkennt man, dass hier ein paar nette Song-Ideen drin stecken. Trotzdem ist hier natürlich viel Bullshit dabei, locker 40 % der Songs hätte man wegstreichen können. Muss aber zugeben, dass ich den Song mit den Schnarch-Geräuschen irgendwie lustig fand. Trotzdem zu viel Lo-Fi-Schnoddrigkeit und unnötige Filler. Das hätte ne schöne 20min-LP werden können, wie im Hardcore üblich.

War froh, als es vorbei war.

Was bin ich hörend? 28 Lieder in 41 Minuten, not bad Herr Kommissar. Es ist mir aber alles ehrlich gesagt zu roh produziert und zu wild. Ich mag den Ansatz sehr, aber es funktioniert nicht.

Es war eine Achterbahn der Gefühle. Vieles hat mich echt gecatched und war dann wieder vorbei, anderes war zwar schnell vorbei hat sich aber angefühlt als dauere es ewig. Bin hier sehr unentschlossen.

I kind of see the point of this album and I can understand why some people might really enjoy it. It’s definitely got a unique sound, but it’s just not for me. This is something that like Kanye West would sample and turn into a really cool song though, which is cool

Not for me. It’s just too disjunct, unpolished, and messy. Every song sounds exactly the same, and dated even for 1995. Lo-fi production can be cool, but it’s just not enough to make this special. It gets old after just a few of the whopping 28 tracks here.

Surely they didn’t need all 28 songs?

Yeah this is guaranteed to be a 5. I’ve never actually listened to it. But this is an album that’s inspired SO many acts I love. It’s lo-fi and crunchy and POPPY! It sounds rough but fun!

That's a whole lot of little songs, very creative, definitely not overproduced. There are some gems to be found, if you like digging into it. But I have to admit - I would've liked a little more time in the oven on most of these songs. Faves: As We Go Up, We Go Down, Game Of Pricks, The Ugly Vision, A Good Flying Bird

This is from an Ohio-based indie band, although they could be English from the way they sound. The album is too disjointed for me since the tracks are generally too short to really get involved in each one. It’s as if they didn’t/couldn’t make the effort to develop lyrics for three minute songs. Even if they did, the tracks are generally forgettable.

If you're gonna be guided by a voice, I'd suggest google maps lady. 28 songs? 41 minutes? Can't argue with that. 'As We Go Up, We Go Down' kinda sounds like the Beatles. Some of the songs are moderately pleasant, but some are just a bit too lo-fi (i.e. noisy). I dunno. I guess, 3. Slur count = 1. Highlight: 'Blimps Go 90'

Ah yes, the classic "genius or did they just not finish the songs" debate. Twenty-something songs and half of them feel like the band left the room mid-chorus. Spins: 2 Playlist Additions - A Salty Salute - As We Go Up, We Go Down - Game of Pricks

Wow, that's a lot of songs. From my knowledge, in at least the top ten on this list for most songs. Seems interesting, especially with it only being 41 minutes. 01. A Salty Salute A cool opener. I hope the whole album is like this! Nice and smooth. 02. Evil Speakers Has a weird tempo. Cool lyrics. 03. Watch Me Jumpstart The guitar through me off a bit, but I ending up really liking this one! Especially that hook, really nice. 04. They're Not Witches Was fun, lol. Funny lyrics. 05. As We Go Up, We Go Down My favorite vocal performance so far. The instrumental was cool too. Reminded me of Car Seat Headrest. 06. (I Wanna Be A) Dumbcharger Has a really cool, atmospheric sound. I can hear how this has influenced the future! 07. Game Of Pricks Some really cool lyrics, but audibly was a bit bland. 08. The Ugly Vision I see the vision (no pun intended), but I just didn't dig it. Sorry, not into this one. 09. A Good Flying Bird All of them have sounded this way, but this one especially sounded SUPER amateur. It's kinda cute because of that, though. 10. Cigarette Tricks Literally went past while writing the track review for A Good Flying Bird. Was kind of funny, lyrics are nonesense. 11. Pimple Zoo Really didn't like this one. Worst track so far. 12. Big Chief Chinese Restaurant A worse As We Go Up, We Go Down. Not bad, just bland. 13. Closer You Are Catchy, but that's really it. A relatively weak one. 14. Auditorium Doesn't make any damn sense. I feel like we've had this song already, too. 15. Motor Away A great one, finally! Some beautiful lyrics, and a great instrumental! Favorite so far! 16. Hit Vile. I have no problem with the f-slur (coming as a bisexual man), but in here I feel like they say it just to say it. Plus, the other lyrics fuckin' suck, along with the instrumentation. I don't care that it's only 20 seconds, my least favorite song from this 1,001 journey so far. 17. My Valuable Hunting Knife Iffy on it. I don't like it, but I also don't NOT like it, ya know? 18. Gold Hick My favorite sub-minute one so far, at least. Still didn't love it, but is better than the other ones. 19. King And Caroline Meh. Just alright. 20. Striped White Jets Sounds weirdly finished compared to the rest of the tracks. One of the better ones. 21. Ex-Supermodel I think there's literally someone snoring in the back. Don't like this. 22. Blimps Go 90 Was cool. Not my favorite, but wasn't bad. 23. Strawdogs Something about this I just really like, but I don't know why. Great song...? 24. Chicken Blows A unique track! I really enjoy the wavering effect in the voice! 25. Little Whirl What's the point? It's not a bad track, but like, I feel nothing. 26. My Son Cool Okay. Cool lyrics. 27. Always Crush Me Feels wrong. I can't describe what I mean, you just gotta... hear it. 28. Alright Meh, was alright. Is cool to end this off with an instrumental piece, but it didn't blow me away. This is... a mess. Nothing feels connected. It all sounds like it was recorded through a tin can twice as well. I can get behind that, hell, one of my favorite albums is The Pod by Ween. But this sounds like crap. Don't get me wrong, there are some great tracks here (Chicken Blows, Striped White Jets, Watch Me Jumpstart), but a lot of this feels like filler. And I usually enjoy albums like this!

Sound quality is not the best, a bit like an unfinished demo tape! but it has a charm, I really enjoyed listening to it!

American lo-fi indie doesn't set my pulse racing, but this has more about it than many of its contemporaries from this era. That said, the album is a bit of mess...too many short, meaningless tracks that have promise and then cut short. In places there's some good stuff here, but overall it's a no from me because it's just a bit exhausting to listen to. Heard before ❌️ Listened this time ✅️ Revisit ❌️ ★★★☆☆(6/10) Total reviewed : 448 Already owned : 99 Purchased : 25 To buy : 1 Nope : 323

I like this conceptually. A ton of short songs, changing frequently like flicking through radio stations. And there are some brilliant songs (Game of Pricks being the standout). There’s also a lot of weird crap offcuts that aren’t good and weaken the experience. I will relisten at some point And maybe I’ll grow to fully love it, warts and all

_Alien Lanes_ is the first album I can remember having to pause because I could not review it quickly enough. Not because it was difficult, forbidding or obscure, but because it kept producing things faster than I could convert them into language. I would still be dictating a thought about one song when another had appeared, done something peculiar and disappeared. Eventually I stopped calling them songs and started calling them ideas. That seemed more accurate. There are twenty-eight of them in forty-one minutes. Some are proper songs. Some are sketches, noises, lyrical fragments, jokes, bits of power pop, little recording experiments or things that seem to have been retained because somebody enjoyed them for twenty seconds. One lasts eighteen seconds and still manages to contain several different thoughts. Another hangs around for nearly three minutes and consequently feels like _Marquee Moon_. There are occasions when Guided by Voices apparently regard ninety seconds as plenty of time to establish a melody, chorus and emotional world, and others where ninety seconds merely means that an undeveloped fragment has been played rather slowly. The obvious critical response is therefore to complain about editing. Editing and development are part of songwriting. Several ideas here could quite easily have become bridges, middle eights or sections of other songs. _A Good Flying Bird_ is a lovely piece of underdeveloped power pop which plainly contains enough material for a larger song. _Cigarette Tricks_ somehow crams an abundance of peculiar ideas into eighteen seconds. _Pimple Zoo_ sounds almost grunge-like before inserting a rhythmic section which appears to have wandered in from an entirely different composition. There are moments when you think that if Robert Pollard had simply put two of these fragments together he might have had one extremely good song instead of two interesting scraps. Except that this increasingly feels like applying the wrong optimisation target to Guided by Voices. The remarkable thing about Pollard is not his ability to polish ideas. It is his apparent inability to stop having them. Ideas are difficult. Plenty of musicians can spend three days making a mediocre idea sound expensive. Far fewer appear capable of producing this many genuinely distinct musical thoughts in the first place. Pollard seems particularly gifted not only at having them but at recognising them quickly enough to get them down before they evaporate. Melody, riff, title, strange lyrical image, odd rhythm: record it, keep it, move on. At album scale, _Alien Lanes_ can sound like somebody's demos. When you consider the extraordinary volume of music Pollard has produced, it begins to sound more like another Tuesday at the office. The method makes even more sense because the roughness is not simply poverty imposed as an aesthetic. The band had the opportunity to scale up and largely chose not to. The Tascam Portastudio and cheap microphones were sufficient for what they were trying to do. That distinction matters. “Lo-fi” can imply people heroically overcoming inadequate equipment, or people deliberately making something sound bad because bad sound has acquired cultural cachet. _Alien Lanes_ feels like neither. These sound like people with very high levels of musical facility having fun with a piece of equipment they understand intimately. And the particular facility they possess is fertility. The Portastudio lets them reduce the distance between an idea occurring and the idea existing. Sometimes that produces a sketch. Sometimes it produces something as complete as _Game of Pricks_, which lasts 1:33 and seems exactly the right length. Another band might have added another verse, another chorus, perhaps a middle eight, and turned it into a conventional three-minute single. I cannot hear what any of that would improve. _Watch Me Jumpstart_ similarly contains a genuinely good melody which is almost perversely under-presented by the recording. _My Valuable Hunting Knife_ is a tiny pop gem, a sort of love song to an object, put together with an almost comic lack of ceremony yet somehow emerging whole. _Blimps Go 90_ uses 1:40 beautifully and is unusually well recorded, demonstrating in the process that murkiness elsewhere is not simply incompetence. That led to one of the more useful distinctions I found while listening. The issue is not whether these songs are short. It is whether they are legible. _Strawdogs_ lasts only seventy-eight seconds, yet has a coherent verse-and-chorus structure, a hummable tune and a lyrical centre. It makes an enormous amount of seventy-eight seconds. By contrast, some longer pieces merely contain the same quantity of information moving more slowly. Brevity and completeness are not opposites; “short” and “concise” are not synonyms either. Tobin Sprout repeatedly brings another colour to the record. It would be too easy to reduce the partnership to Pollard supplying fertility and Sprout supplying structure, because Pollard is perfectly capable of constructing complete pop songs by himself. But whenever Sprout appears I seem to hear a different temperature. His songs and collaborations often have a little more immediately visible architecture, some unusual harmonic shading, or an instinct for compact pop construction which occasionally makes him sound like a little Nick Lowe. _Little Whirl_ could have fallen out of Stiff Records in 1978: short, catchy, slightly eccentric, and somehow ambitious without becoming remotely grandiose. _King and Caroline_ is stranger, more impressionistic, almost a voice shouting in the wilderness. Sprout does not supply competence Pollard lacks; he changes the colour of the room. The lyrics make the album even less comfortable than its pop instincts suggest. Pollard does not seem particularly interested in narrative logic. His words often proceed by image logic: an egg, a man-child, a procession; a saucer-shaped coffin followed by Baron von Richthofen; beer in a fridge, sex, courage, somebody's life slipping away. These things are not necessarily puzzles waiting for interpretation. They collide until they create emotional weather. That is why even the funniest parts are rarely cosy. _Ex-Supermodel_ feels like a tiny diary fragment rather than a conventional song. A relationship, an admission of exploitation and an abrupt career aside are placed alongside the thoroughly unglamorous sound of somebody snoring. That snoring is obnoxious. It reminded me of a former girlfriend who had attended modelling school and later acquired one of the early CPAP machines, a device which seemed to solve spectacular snoring by replacing it with something resembling a tractor beside the bed. The juxtaposition is almost exactly the sort of thing _Alien Lanes_ thrives upon: glamour meeting bodies, memory meeting irritation, comedy sitting beside something less comfortable. _Chicken Blows_ does something similar. A ridiculous vocal effect sounds as though Pollard is patting his hand against his mouth, like somebody amusing a toddler by interfering with the sounds coming from their own voice. Yet underneath is an impressionistic lyrical fragment involving beer, rooms, a shared home, sex, courage and lives slipping away. It is neither simply funny nor particularly tender. It feels like a little piece of somebody's life which has been caught without the usual explanatory apparatus. This album is genuinely funny, though, and that seems important. Not funny because people are using cheap cassette equipment. The humour comes from invention itself. Again and again the appropriate response is simply: good grief, Bob, what now? _Gold Hick_ piles together dumb luck, death, strange vehicles, a saucer-shaped coffin and Baron von Richthofen before introducing something which might generously be described as a guitar solo, although a cat walking over the strings cannot entirely be ruled out. _Hit_ throws together becoming of age, a giggling companion, weather patterns and the pronouncement “now that's a hit” before disappearing almost immediately. The comedy reminded me of a period when Maggie Osterberg and I were writing very rapidly and would invent imaginary bands, sometimes complete with histories and biographies. One of hers was HARBL, all capitals, who were fabulous and funny. It also reminded me of the little drawings I used to make on scraps of paper when bored at work. One was simply a slice of bread with a star on it called _Glam Rock Toast_. It was not an unfinished artwork requiring future development. Bread, star, title: done. That may be a better metaphor for much of _Alien Lanes_ than “demo”. A demo implies a provisional version of something waiting to become proper. Many of these tracks are finished doodles. Musical Post-it notes. Nobody needs to explain why Glam Rock Toast deserved to exist, and Guided by Voices rarely seem inclined to justify their fragments either. Occasionally, though, the recording method becomes something more deliberate than rapid documentation. _Always Crush Me_ is one of my favourite things here because its guitars have been oddly muted until they barely sound like guitars at all. The result is an experimental soundscape onto which different vocal textures seem to have been layered. The changing voices make the lyric feel less like one narrator than a succession of perspectives delivering fragments of perception. Here the Portastudio stops being notebook and becomes instrument. The limitations are not merely sufficient; they are being actively exploited. Then comes _Alright_, an almost absurdly patient closing track at 2:58. A rhythm guitar establishes a floor while another guitar wanders over it, less soloing than thinking aloud. More than a minute and a half passes before four sung “alrights” finally arrive. On this album that delay feels almost like prog. Afterward the guitars begin to dissolve into less formal shapes while the remaining lyric is intoned through a feeding-back microphone. The track moves from song to refrain to dissolution, until the voice itself is sitting inside noise. After twenty-seven tracks in which ideas are generally captured and abandoned at speed, the final one finally remains long enough for us to hear an idea lose its form again. The difficulty with _Alien Lanes_ is that it falls awkwardly between listening modes. I want to give it my full attention because there is so much to notice: little chord changes, unusual vocal treatments, tiny lyrical fragments, shifting recording textures, the different colour Sprout introduces. But giving it that attention is exhausting. You cannot sensibly put it on while cooking dinner, because if you turn around to drain the pasta you may have missed an entire track. Yet treating it as background music reduces all that invention to a vague lo-fi blur. That is why I found it unusually difficult to review. It demands foreground attention while repeatedly disrupting the conditions under which foreground attention normally works. Just as I begin inhabiting one idea, another replaces it. The album keeps resetting the attention clock. A more disciplined editor could unquestionably have extracted a very good conventional power-pop album from this material. But I no longer think that would necessarily have been a better _Alien Lanes_. It would have been a more normal record. It would also have hidden the thing that became most fascinating during this listen: the surplus. The weaker fragments are part of the evidence. They tell us that the good songs were not isolated miracles painstakingly extracted from drought. They were appearing inside a period when ideas seem to have been arriving faster than anyone could sensibly process them. Better editing would improve the hit rate but conceal the fertility. So I am left with an album whose limitation and achievement are basically the same property. It is funny, catchy, awkward, exhausting, inventive, occasionally irritating and extraordinarily alive. It preserves ideas at something close to the speed of their arrival, accepting that some will emerge as fully realised pop songs and others as nothing more than an interesting mark on a scrap of paper. I could imagine a more polished _Alien Lanes_. I could imagine a more disciplined one. I could very easily imagine a version containing twelve excellent songs. I am less certain that I can imagine one which would tell me quite so vividly what it felt like to be inside this particular creative explosion.

This might sound weird but I don’t even know how you conceive of this

quite rude to call this slacker rock when it seems these gentlemen worked quite hard on this record!

I'm not really surprised that this is a controversial one. Personally, I really liked its scrappy, lo fi indie vibes. It has a lot of short songs and most of them clicked with me.

This sounds like a bunch of unfinished demo songs from a high school garage band. 28 songs in 41 minutes? It’s harder to finish songs than to start them, so from a songwriting perspective I just find this album lazy.

6/10 Buen álbum. Algunas partes bastante medio pelo, pero en general esta piola

For such a long track list, it was quite short. Lots of hits and misses on here. I was hoping for a little more substance when there was a track that hit though. Favourite Track(s): Motor Away, Ex-Supermodel Least Favourite Track(s): Cigarette Tricks, Auditorium, The Ugly Vision

I don’t know how I feel about about these 40+ 1:00 song album… It feels a little manic. This one was 90’s alt rock.

“Game of Pricks” is such a beautiful song. I found the rest of the album to be less than enjoyable. Also, I don’t know if the singer was putting on an affect, but I was shocked to learn that this group is from the States.

I mildly enjoyed this album as background music. I don't think I'd enjoy it as a cohesive collection of music interplaying with grace and harmony.

So many short songs, but so many of them are catchy and super fun. Couple of weird slurs, but I guess it was of the time?

trying too hard to show they don’t care

Listens: 3 Standout Tracks: Blimps Go 90 Pretty damn bland if you ask me. 28 songs over 41 minutes is basically no more that 2 minutes per song. There's not a lot of room to impress on a sub 2 minute song. Sure, you get more room for experimentation (quantity over quality is a choice I guess), but at the cost of all the songs blending together and being rather uninspired. Even if you do hear a good song, if you're not actively keeping track, good luck finding it. I don't think what I've listened to was bad, just really really incredibly boring and mentally exhausting.

These guys want to be a 60s band, not a 90s band. 2.5

3.5

I think I like what this is going for but it also sounds like a chaotic mess to me I don't think I can get it to five stars or even close. I think I probably should revisit this at some point there are some interesting things going on here. Kind of the same way I find *Guyville* interesting but chaotic. (8.1) ★★★★

A cool style of 90s alternative rock, but I find the album too fragmented with all the short tracks. 3.5 stars

This is an excellent album, and probably my favorite GBV album. The ultra lo-fi production is an acquired taste, to say the least, but Pollard and Sprout are super gifted melody writers. It's an interesting balance between the scrappy DIY production and the super catchy songs. There's a ton of bangers here, including "A Salty Salute", "Watch Me Jumpstart", "As We Go Up, We Go Down", "Motor Away", "My Valuable Hunting Knife", "King and Caroline", "Chicken Blows", and the sublime "Game of Pricks". 5 stars.

What an earache. This is even worse than the Kid Rock album. If only they could have got the voices who guided them to sing on the record instead.

some voices should have guided these guys to produce their stuff a bit more

23 Seconds into the album opener and I hear the main dudes lips smack. Same thing happened at 1:08 of the same song. That first song made it hard not to be overly analytical of the whole thing, which I felt was a shame. AITA for this? I agree with pretty much everybody else, the production value here is non-existent. Rating: 5.3/10

I've never wanted an album full of 2-minute songs to end so badly in my life. Sounds like neighborhood kids fucking around on their hand-me-down instruments in the garage with big dreams of playing the community bandshell at the Fourth of July event downtown. Occasional moments that sound like something coming together, but the lyrics are nonsense and it's half-asses sung over music that generally sucks.

Probably deserves a 2 because it's not outrageously bad, but really just annoyed this is on the list. The music isn't anything special, the songs are short so the entire album is just minute long song clips with no flow or theme other than utter boringness.

They gave themselves 28 chances to make a good song and failed on all attempts

I love the aesthetic and creativity

I’m a GbV fan and there are a couple of songs on this album that are absolute classics. Game of Pricks is power pop perfection. I’m not sure if Bee Thousand is on this list. That’s what I’ve considered their/his essential album while Alien Lanes is uneven and sometimes messy but the highs are extremely high. This isn’t an album that I’ve gone back to much, and this listen won’t change that.

Not as celebrated as Bee Thousand but still a masterpiece.

Pure fractured rock genius. Too many classic tracks to name. Pollard’s output is wildly uneven, but when it hits it hits like few others.

Send this to another world. 1.0

Short tunes, too experimental, not very special

Again, didn’t need to hear that. Think I need a breather from this game.

This album has a runtime of 48 minutes, comprising 28 songs or snippets of sound. Some tracks are reminiscent of the Beatles in their airiness, while others are highly experimental and sound like U2. Overall, the music has a raw, unfinished quality—which may explain why the tracks are kept intentionally short. It is a diverse mix. Some parts sound strongly like Oasis. There are a few lovely guitar pieces. "Game of Pricks" sounds beautiful despite its imperfections. I wasn't familiar with this record at all, but that changes today.

Weird in a nice way, kind of persuasive into listen another song, to check if it's different, to check if next is new....I don't know, I enjoyed it

My kind of album in terms of having a lot of very short songs. I like that stuff. Though I will say, this album sounds like my folder of "Songs" which I've never finished. It's a lot of pieces of songs. I'm not in love with any of it but I didn't dislike it. I think it's a really cool concept and I like the fuzziness of the sound. It definitely evokes a specific feeling of listening to music in the 2000s either on a car radio or on a CD player. I didn't love the lyrics however so that brings it down a little for me.

This shit really says Guided By Voices.... Guided By Voices is a strange band. This legendary indie rock band formed in the mid 80s alongside all that crazy Dinosaur/Sonic Youth slacker hip hypery. Guided By Voices basically adopted what the Minutemen sought out to do and made mini pop songs of less than 3 minutes, most of which average 1 minute. These songs were basically a hodgepodge of different styles, but most of them either power pop, post-punk, grunge or acoustic wankery. All of which were recorded incredibly shoddily and lofi. The key to this sauce is frontman Robert Pollard, who basically can never put down his pen cause he's written over a thousand songs by now and doesn't seem to be slowing down. He also self-reviews his work, most of the time humorously shitting on his work, which only elevates him as godhand to Gen X hipsters and millennials. And it must be said, this is a fucking hipster band. This band is for those who love completely raw music without any polish because Alien Lanes was effectively recorded for less than $10. Ironically though, this was the first album that GBV released after being signed to Matador Records in one of their most expensive deals ever brokered by the label. All of these songs are effectively demos: snippets of potentially 5 minute pop songs. Instead the 28 songs have been rendered, cut down of bloat and bombast into a pile of scraggly bones of less than 40 minutes. You'd expect this album to ugly. There is no reprieve between any of the songs, they just lead from one song to another like a sudden film cut. But there's something really strange about how CATCHY these songs end up being, considering that they barely last longer than 1:30. And they are very versatile. You effectively have not only the powerpop and ballads, but also skits, anthems and jam sessions, all in snapshots. It feels really.... wonky but fun. It's like listening to a rock opera.... but written by someone with anterograde amnesia. I guess the advantage of writing in such a way is quite clear. This album feels very very consistent, cause no song seems to overtake one another. And even better, you don't realise that 40 minutes would have past listening to this album. The constant movement of this album just keeps you on your toes to relax with these lofi songs. Maybe those weed-stenched hipsters were right about this band. Maybe it would convince me to try to ultimate hippie record in Bee Thousand. I won't go that far into the GBV cult, but I'm considering...

Just nope.

eeeeeeeweeeeeee bprimg repetitive ..............no auto

Woah, a mixed bag. Beatles-obsessed (but coming across more ELO), indebted to Sonic Youth, the Pixies, and The Replacements, and occasionally hitting upon a gold nugget of a song. Overall, this has moments of gorgeousness but it's too derivative. I have no idea what Guided By Voices sound like stripped of all the influences.

The club is open.

What a surprise album! Great album. Reminded of early built to spill meets the lofi of ween and meat puppets without the ripping guuitar

Malo

So many ideas and yet they all sound pretty similar. Maybe I'm too much of a f*ggot to understand it though x

This wasn’t really an album, it was a concept of an album. Some of these songs could have been good if they were actually developed.

Some of these tunes were tolerable and maybe even borderline good. Other were not so fortunate. Mixed emotions here as this seemed like a mish-mosh of musical styles thrown together to form a collection. I’d never go back to this album if I’m being honest.

The music isn’t actually bad, but it definitely isn’t good. It’s general. It holds no point of view. It is completely forgettable and leaves no trace once it’s gone. This is lemon jello rock. Fine for the moment but impossible to make you ever crave it again.

I'm pissed off about a few things. 1- of all the garbage included on this list this is the garbagiest 2- I like low fi and I like short songs....but damn this is something else 3- these aren't songs. These are ideas for song. F U for assembling a bunch of thoughts and passing it off an an album. 4- Most of these ideas are shit 5- On the rare occassion they had a good idea and you start getting into it....gone, like a fart in the wind. 6- I'm super pissed because there is a cool album in here but they were either too lazy or thought too little of their audience to actually try to produce one. As this project has progressed I've become more and more conservative with both my 1 and 5 ratings. You have to be really shit or really piss me off for a 1. Guess which one this is.

Reminds me of The White Album. If you don't like a particular song, just wait a minute (or in this case, sometimes only 20 seconds) and another one will be along. The music is lively, edgy, and full of hooks or riffs that are occasionally the whole substance of the songs. Overall, I liked the music and constantly changing experience.

Good moments (I love "Game of Pricks", which sounds like Big Star), but there are too many left turns and (too) short songs that make it feel a little disjointed and jumpy. Very good indie rock, I'll round up for feeling generous.

This album is annoying to me as you can hear the foundations of 10 potentially good to great songs, but none of them are given the required length to do so. The lofi production did grow on me and when you listen to this as a full album experience it isn’t bad. It just could’ve been better

This felt like a bunch of unreleased demos? Some cool sounds but nothing of too much substance?

Ei tää ny oikein lähteny mut ihan kuunneltava

Miks tää audio on hemo muffed? Oon myös varma että rumpali puolissa biiseissä off-beat

### Guided by Voices – Alien Lanes (1995) Lately I've had a few albums that I could barely discuss with any degree of impartiality because they immediately stuck a knife between my ribs. Well, here's another one I can't approach objectively at all. But for a completely different reason. I know this album inside out — as far as that is even possible — and it is so deeply embedded in my fibres that it has probably mutated my DNA by now. I jumped aboard the Guided by Voices hype train with the album that followed this one, *Under the Bushes, Under the Stars*, after hearing that my heroes from dEUS were crazy about the band and reading a glowing review, probably in *De Volkskrant*. What an absolutely insane experience that first encounter was. I immediately went looking for whatever GBV I could find, which wasn't particularly easy at the time. That included this album and the two or three before it: *Bee Thousand* and *Propeller* / *Vampire on Titus* — the latter two squeezed together onto a single CD. **Crushing.** This was music I discovered towards the end of my student days, and it helped shape me into the person I am. This is part of my identity. So no, I cannot possibly approach *Alien Lanes* without prejudice. Or, to use the more flattering term, without being utterly unprejudiced. Much like Radiohead's *The Bends*. Though with *The Bends* that isn't really much of an issue: you'd have to actively hate guitar music not to be flattened by the quality of that album. With this one it's different. You can think all sorts of things about *Alien Lanes*. And that has everything to do with the subgenre — or really the entire subculture — we're dealing with, and with Robert “Bob” Pollard, the driving force behind Guided by Voices. Or rather: the band **is** Bob Pollard. This is lo-fi. That means an album of 41 minutes and 15 seconds containing **28 songs** — yes, you read that correctly: an average song length of 1 minute and 28 seconds — that sounds as though most of it was recorded in a garage on a cassette recorder from 1982. Or in a teenager's bedroom using a Walkman with a recording function. Every now and then, a song turns up that actually sounds vaguely like professional music. Then something like **“Cigarette Tricks”** comes along — thankfully over after 18 seconds — sounding worse than a 78 rpm record from 1923 that has been copied 26 times. And then there's Pollard himself. By now the man has registered something like 3,000 songs as compositions, in barely half the amount of time - with interruptions - Dolly Parton has been professionally active. There have been years in which around a hundred **new** Pollard songs appeared across GBV and solo albums. They aren't all equally good. Some are complete rubbish. Not even half-finished ideas that might have become something if they'd been developed properly, but things that would have been better off either being worked on considerably more or, preferably, never appearing on an album at all. But then again, over the four decades he's now been active, Pollard has written and released an almost absurd number of genuinely beautiful songs. They don't always *sound* beautiful, because most of these albums were released as lo-fi turds, but the songs themselves are incredibly strong. There are at least ten of them on this album. Some were written by Pollard's sidekick Tobin Sprout, who often comes up with slightly more melodic songs and sings them a little more sweetly. Sprout was sometimes in the band and sometimes not, and also released several albums under his own name containing dozens of songs, one somehow even more beautiful than the next. And just one more thing about Pollard. Before becoming a professional — *ahem* — musician, he had a perfectly respectable profession: **teacher**. Yes. It isn't such a strange background for someone who only became a full-time musician relatively late in life. Pollard was about 39 when *Alien Lanes* came out, and this album, together with *Bee Thousand*, represented GBV's commercial breakthrough. But given his behaviour, I hope he was at least a reasonably unconventional teacher. I saw GBV at the Melkweg in Amsterdam sometime around 2000. It was a crushing experience. The band had a roadie whose entire job throughout the concert was quite simple: keep the band members, and Pollard in particular, supplied with cans of beer. One of the highlights of my life came when Pollard started handing cans out to the people at the front of the crowd. **I got one.** The amount of beer that man consumed was unbelievable. And, in a way, that is how the music sounds too. So what is the music like, apart from containing a ridiculous number of great songs? GBV's first EP sounded heavily influenced by R.E.M., at the time one of the few remotely well-known American underground guitar bands. That was 1986. By this point, however, we're deep into a straightforward guitar-rock version of the Beatles. These are incredibly melodic songs: classic pop that somehow doesn't sound like pop at all. And every now and then Pollard and Sprout produce surprisingly beautiful vocal harmonies. If you're open to it, *Alien Lanes* is a crushing experience. One gem after another. **“A Salty Salute.” “Watch Me Jumpstart.” “As We Go Up, We Go Down.” The phenomenal “Game of Pricks” and “Motor Away.” “A Good Flying Bird.” “Closer You Are.” “My Valuable Hunting Knife.” “Striped White Jets,”** which astonishingly has a somewhat more complicated structure and actually passes the two-minute mark. **“Blimps Go 90.” “Strawdogs.”** The genuinely wonderful, wonderfully melodic **“Little Whirl.”** And the almost entirely instrumental closer **“Alright.”** That last one is nearly three minutes long, which does a remarkable amount of damage to the album's average song length. Whether this is actually GBV's best album, I doubt. Later in their career they even made albums without the lo-fi attitude, such as *Do the Collapse*, produced by Ric Ocasek of the Cars. And the highlights on *Bee Thousand* may actually be even higher than the ones here. The amount of crap is considerably higher too. There is almost no band about whom I would say this, but for Guided by Voices I genuinely think a newcomer is better off starting with the bizarre compilation *Human Amusement at Hourly Rates* from 2003: 32 gems in 77 minutes, and not a single second of it is boring. And yet, this album. **What an experience.**

Music's great, singer's not well-known but that's honestly what makes it wonderful — underground artists creating masterpieces that often beat out mainstream names. Really glad I found this album, genuinely love it, definitely gonna give it more than one listen. The music carries a real feeling and that's the magic of it. "Game of Prick" is a complete masterpiece, hands down.

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Never heard of the guided voices before. Short songs. Some were good.