GBV

I've loved Guided By Voices for years. Got hooked on 'em with 1999's splendid Ric Okasek-produced Do The Collapse: crashing waves of guitars, irresistible hooks, vocals threatening to pull down the sky. The album is a concentrated mass of pure pop, and it's surely no coincidence that the cover consists of what looks like multiple Volkswagen Beetles compressed into a cube. Then I began digging through their back catalog (and they've got one hell of a back catalog). Picked up Bee Thousand and Vampire on Titus, sucked in by album jackets listing an inordinately large number of songs, with titles like "Gold Star for Robot Boy" and "Superior Sector Janitor X," and became hypnotized by just how amazingly great all these songs were.

[And by "amazingly great," I don't mean polished, or radio-friendly, or tonally coherent, because GBV songs don't tend to be any of the above. They're messy pop nuggets that often manage to cover half the sonic landscape in under two minutes, somehow managing to drop you off where you started with your hair all mussed up wondering what the hell just happened, the musical equivalent of hopping in a stolen Porsche driven by your friend with Attention Deficit Disorder. That's what I mean by "amazingly great."]

The thing is, when your new favorite band has almost twenty albums to their credit, not counting the couple dozen side projects the lead singer somehow manages to churn out in his spare time, and you're working on a limited budget, and you don't have a brain the size of a planet, you're not going to get through their entire oeuvre, or even remember the names of most of the songs, great as those songs and their names may be. I got a couple oldies, then picked up the thread from there and bought everything after.

Then, on one happy day, eMusic came into my life, and the resourceful little gnomes that churn out "My Recommendations" somehow popped up with Alien Lanes, despite the fact that I hadn't got any GBV from the site previously, and wasn't even aware that they were on the list of featured artists. And now, while I'm not kicking myself too hard for missing this glorious work of pop genius, I AM doing my best to make up for it. So that's why I've been listening to "As We Go Up, We Go Down," which could have been a number-one hit by the Beatles in another dimension, pretty much nonstop for the last week.