GUIDED BY VOICES Alien Lanes (reissue, 1995) MATADOR
Their brilliant eighth, condensing rock, pop, punk and psych into glittering chunks.
FOR a brief time in the early ’90s, Guided By Voices were the coolest band in New York City. They weren’t Manhattanites, though, fresh out of Swiss finishing schools and into skinny jeans. Instead this was a gang of mid-thirties blokes from Dayton, Ohio, who liked sports and worked normal jobs – guitarist Mitch Mitchell, fantastically, in a sandpaper factory. They’d get together on the weekend, drink copious amounts of beer and live out their rock’n’roll fantasies with a four-track tape machine. Leading these informal sessions was their singer Robert Pollard, a schoolteacher with an obsession with writing songs; usually short snippets that went straight to the hooks.
To borrow , it had been an unstable journey: Guided By Voices had been a semi-functioning unit since the ’80s, initially playing live in Dayton clubs and recording in proper studios, before lack of an audience and dissatisfaction with professional recording sent them underground, both figuratively and literally. Then came a string of lo-fi, basement-recorded albums, either self-released or put out on small local labels. By ’93, though, they’d somehow become the toast of New York’s indie scene, with tapes being passed around by Chavez’s Matt Sweeney, the Matador office, Sonic Youth and more. 1994’s superb was a hit with fans and a post-Nirvana industry: Warner Bros were one label interested in signing them, while The Breeders, whose Deal sisters were from Dayton, covered the group’s “Shocker In Gloomtown” on their “Head To Toe” EP that year. Part of the appeal for many was that the group were a myth: they hadn’t gigged since 1986 and, pre-internet, it was impossible to work out quite who they were, or even when their music dated from.
