Guided By Voices’ Alien Lanes will be getting the reissue treatment.
Matador Records announced that the band’s album will be the first in a series of 25th-anniversary reissues aptly called Revisionist History. The others (so far) include Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, Yo La Tengo’s Electr-O-Pura, Chavez’s Gone Glimmering, Bailter Space’s Wammo, and Mary Timony’s Mountains.
As for GBV, the release will be pressed on blue, green, and red vinyl. Limited pre-orders (2,500 copies) come with a keyring/bottle opener.
The album, which featured 28 songs clocking in at 41 minutes, was one of the most celebrated releases in GBV’s extensive catalog. The reissue will be released later this year.
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Robert Pollard had this to say about Alien Lanes:
We were fearless at the time we recorded Alien Lanes. That’s why it bristles with insane energy and confidence. We were still riding the high accolades of Bee Thousand and probably should have succumbed to the critical pressure of a worthy follow-up. Instead we had, in our megalomaniacal view, mastered the instant gratification machine known as the 4-track and began recording song after song with titles like “Cuddling Bozo’s Octopus,” “My Valuable Hunting Knife,” “Pimple Zoo” and “After the Quake (Let’s Bake a Cake).”
The door had been opened for us to throw out as many weird ass ideas as we were capable of and we did. We even thought we were starting to look cooler and decided cool enough to have the entire back cover be a photograph of us in the basement looking pseudo intellectually laid back and stoned with long hair, stars and stripe gym shoes and a box of Tide in the background.
Our friend Kim thought the album was too bombastic. Too frenetic and difficult to digest. I agreed. We were proud to be putting out our first album on Matador and cock strutted accordingly. It cost us $10 to make. It’s worth a million. I personally think it’s better than B-1000 (but not by much). There are two different camps of GBV fans to argue and debate.
God bless 1995 and open hearted record labels like Matador (and Scat before them) for allowing bands like us, with the preferred limited resources, to remove the constraints and pre-conceived notions of the more industry-minded constituents who would have much preferred we destroy the cassette master of Alien Lanes in the better interest of sound manufacturing and what’s more agriculturally consumable. It’s better to leave the farm than to continue plodding through the cow shit.
Also, Guided By Voices shared their 1996 documentary, Watch Me Jumpstart, which you can see below:
