Alien Lanes

Certain Songs #556: Guided by Voices – “King And Caroline”

June 4, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Alien Lanes
Year: 1995

In 1995, Jim Greer basically beat every other rock critic ever by joining the band he helped mythologize.

After all, Robert Duncan never joined KISS, Lester Bangs never played with Lou Reed and Dave Marsh didn’t join the E Street band, but after Bee Thousand, Greer replaced Greg Demos as the bass player in Guided by Voices.

Certain Songs #555: Guided by Voices – “Motor Away”

June 3, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Alien Lanes
Year: 1995

To be honest, I could probably do a half-dozen songs from Alien Lanes, so just because I’m not writing about songs like “As We Go Up, We Go Down,” “A Salty Salute,” “My Valuable Hunting Knife” or Tobin Sprout’s “Little Whirl” doesn’t mean I don’t love them, it just means that I’m probably already doing too many GBV songs as it is.

That said, there was no way I wasn’t going to write about the two minutes of power pop glory that is “Motor Away.”

Certain Songs #554: Guided by Voices – “Closer You Are”

June 2, 2016 by Jim Connelly

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.