Guided By Voices: Alien Lanes LP

1995's Alien Lanes, the eighth full-length LP from America’s finest exponents of rock’n’roll songwriting and from-the-heartland warmth, contains 28 songs. GBV’s Off-White Album if you will. Genuine and insincere fans alike will recognize classics like "Watch Me Jumpstart," "My Valuable Hunting Knife" and "Motor Away." 

 

This extended excavation of American childhood, memory and the niceties of human contact tosses away the jaggeder edges of Bee Thousand for an occasional documentary of the more distorted margins of pop/rock history: the last songs on side 2 of early Kinks albums, the song-structures of mid-period Wire and one-offs by Deram bands from Colchester and Canterbury. 

 

In their transition from lo-fi to lo-mid-fi, Guided By Voices have scraped off only a little piece of the browning acetate that covers their conceptual picture sleeve. Alien Lanes makes an art out of pairing anthemic hooks with muscular and melodic rock 'n' roll guitars, almost exclusively accomplished here in brief blazes of brilliance and beauty.