This Saturday (April 4) will mark 25 years since the release of Guided by Voices' Alien Lanes, and to mark the occasion, the Ohio outfit are treating their eighth full-length album to a vinyl reissue.
Scheduled to arrive around August 21, the Alien Lanes 25th anniversary reissue is the first title to come as part of Matador Records' newly launched "Revisionist History" release series. The new Alien Lanes pressing will arrive on blue, green and red multicoloured vinyl inspired by the album's cover art.
Limited pre-orders will also come with a limited-edition Guided by Voices keyring/bottle opener, based on an original 1995 design. You can pre-order the reissue now.
GBV frontman Robert Pollard has also written a short essay about Alien Lanes that you can read below, where you'll also find the 1996 GBV documentary Watch Me Jumpstart, directed by Banks Tarver.
Guided by Voices released Surrender Your Poppy Field this past February.
Matador's Revisionist History series is also set to bring Pavement's Wowee Zowee, Yo La Tengo's Electr-O-Pura, Chavez's Gone Glimmering, Bailter Space's Wammo, and Mary Timony's Mountains back to wax going forward.
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."
Scheduled to arrive around August 21, the Alien Lanes 25th anniversary reissue is the first title to come as part of Matador Records' newly launched "Revisionist History" release series. The new Alien Lanes pressing will arrive on blue, green and red multicoloured vinyl inspired by the album's cover art.
Limited pre-orders will also come with a limited-edition Guided by Voices keyring/bottle opener, based on an original 1995 design. You can pre-order the reissue now.
GBV frontman Robert Pollard has also written a short essay about Alien Lanes that you can read below, where you'll also find the 1996 GBV documentary Watch Me Jumpstart, directed by Banks Tarver.
Guided by Voices released Surrender Your Poppy Field this past February.
Matador's Revisionist History series is also set to bring Pavement's Wowee Zowee, Yo La Tengo's Electr-O-Pura, Chavez's Gone Glimmering, Bailter Space's Wammo, and Mary Timony's Mountains back to wax going forward.
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."