Alien Lanes vs. Bee Thousand: A Lo-Fi Heavyweight Fight
Which legendary Guided By Voices album best represents the spirit of lo-fi rock?
In the blue corner,
It’s the album that was supposed to be the final Guided By Voices album. Around 1994, GBV frontman and overall songwriting wizard Bob Pollard was considering giving up the then decade old project. The idea was that he would focus on his fourth grade teaching career.
Instead, he decided to cobble together an amalgamation of offbeat and random unused songs strewn amongst the band’s extremely prolific back catalog.
Bee Thousand is widely considered the band’s opus, despite the fact that it was recorded in various basements and rooms amidst the band members’ homes in Dayton, Ohio. Songs like “Echos Myron” and “Gold Star For Robot Boy” lyrically epitomized where the band was at during this crossroads of Pollard’s career choice, and from front to back the album gives off a passionate, youthful, almost downright whimsical energy caked with drunken basement recording haze.
Without a doubt, a pivotal album to the ‘90’s lo-fi scene . . .
AND in the red corner,
The bombastic, 28-song, 41 minute, ADHD haven that was spawned in the wake of Bee Thousand’s unexpected explosion within the indie underground.
Alien Lanes is the band at their most confident and least fucks given, deciding to ride the wave of continuing on living out their childhood dreams after a bit of public validation. The response to getting signed by a well-respected independent label (Matador Records) ? Making the most untamed and free-spirited album of their careers, and yet again, doing it in their basements on a crappy four-track machine and featuring instruments such as snoring and trash-can banging.
Despite the peculiarity, this album also holds its spot in the DIY/lo-fi “canon”. Whatever opinions are held on its fragmented nature, its unrestricted and inventive make-up certainly recalls the very concept of DIY freedom, and songs like “Game of Pricks” and “Motor Away” serve as all time hallmarks for the band.
But which of these albums better represents soul of DIY rock in general?
Bee Thousand may have the advantage in having the more foraged construction, if you will. Each song on the album being made up of one of Pollard’s throwaway demos from previous years gives the album a very patchwork feel that would be synonymous with DIY.
On the other hand, Alien Lanes perhaps encapsulates the empowering attitude of lo-fi and DIY. The wild segues and interludes combined with song titles like “Pimple Zoo” and “Cigarette Tricks” are thing no ordinary band would waste time on in an “actual” studio setting. But just screwing around in the basement? Sure, might as well throw those on the record too.
Who wins?
12 rounds in . . . Mills Lane can’t pick a winner. It’s impossible to say which one means more. Any card carrying GBV-head will tell you their favorite likely depends on the day.
In a way, it is sort of a Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul conundrum — in reality, it is all one story. You can’t have an Alien Lanes without Bee Thousand. Each one lets the other into the club.
The club is open.