Album: Alien Lanes
Year: 1995
After the electric shock recognition of Bee Thousand, I was way more prepared for the follow-up, 1995’s Alien Lanes, which crammed a completely ludicrous 28 songs into a 41-minute CD.
This kind of delicious overkill makes Alien Lanes if not the best Guided by Voices album, then definitely the most Guided by Voices album.
I seem to recall somebody somewhere comparing it to The Who Sell Out, and I like that comparison, but instead of mimicking a AM pirate radio station beaming the hits onshore, the experience of Alien Lanes is more like driving your car trying to tune in one of the local college radio stations, only you’re only able to get bits and pieces of each song, until you suddenly zero in on the greatest song you’ve never heard before that you might never hear again.
Like “Closer You Are,” where out of the murk comes super fuzzy guitars, and a couple of guys singing:
Chain smoke rings like a vapor snake kiss
She says, she don’t know why
The closer you are, the quicker it hits you
Closer you are, the quicker it hits you
Now you can see the boys dreaming, scheming
And you wonder, “where have I heard this before?” Because you’re already singing “the quicker it hits you” before you’ve even heard it the second time, but while you’re still trying to figure out if it’s some like mod band or something, the whole song stops for a second and one of the guys sings:
I get up at seven o’clock
And drive myself up to the Lookout Rock
And before you can go “wait, what?” they all dive back into the chorus.
The closer you are, the quicker it hits you
The closer you are, the quicker it hits you
Now you can see the boys dreaming, schemingThe closer you are, the quicker it hits you
The closer you are, the quicker it hits you
And then the song just ends, and something else starts — a slow droning thing — and you’re all “no, no, bring that back,” cos you’re worried that you’re never going to hear it again, because you’re going to lose the station before they back announce the songs, hell maybe you’ve already lost the station and you still have no idea who it even was.
And maybe you spend the rest of your life wondering what that song even was.
“Closer You Are”
“Closer You Are” performed live in 2010
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